


Many Ways to Rise

by Zetared



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Cartoon Physics, Chronic Pain, Disabled Character, Emillie Agreste’s A+ Parenting, F/M, Gabriel Agreste’s A+ Parenting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-04-03 17:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21493834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: This fic boils down to “what if Adrien was physically disabled, though?”
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 37
Kudos: 414





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic can hold so much author projection, babey!

As a child, Adrien dreamed of performing incredible physical feats like dancing and jumping and going up flights upon flights of stairs. Where other children might report dreams of flight, Adrien dreamed of legs unencumbered, of arms that did not ache from the strain of carrying his body from place to place.

“Hey! Are you daydreaming? Pay attention!”

Chat Noir blinks and tosses Ladybug a small salute of apology even as he leaps high into the air, soaring over an alley and landing mid-step on the surface of a separate rooftop. Behind him, Ladybug performs a similar jump, a red-black blur in the corner of his vision.

He wonders, sometimes, what she’s capable of outside of the suit. Can she run and jump and twirl so freely? Is she just as strong, fast, and capable? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Certainly, she wouldn’t have to be, not based on his own personal experience with the miraculous nature of the, er, well, miraculous.

“Sorry, my lady,” Chat calls over to her with a grin. “Just taking a quick cat nap.”

She rolls her eyes and jumps to the side as a giant projectile lands between them, shattering the rooftop to bits and caving it in. Chat springs away from the wreckage, too, and thanks his lucky stars for superhuman agility as he lands in an easy, smooth tuck-and-roll a rooftop away. 

Not as lucky (ironically), Ladybug fails to make the jump and drops out of his sight. Chat cries out reflexively, bounding to the edge of the rooftop with the aid of his staffs. He plants one against the concrete and prepares to dive into the open gap between buildings after his partner.

Ladybug’s familiar spotted yo-yo appear, tossed over the edge of the bricks like a grappling hook. She scampers up the string and tosses herself onto the roof with a heavy sigh of relief. 

Chat echoes the noise. “Wow, Bugaboo,” he says, voice tight, “Close call.”

She offers him a reassuring smile and flips gracefully onto her feet. “Don’t worry, _chaton_. A lady knows how to fly, when necessary.”

Chat smiles at her, his heart warm in his chest. He loves her, he loves her.

She tugs on his wrist. “He’s getting away!”

Chat nods his head and follows after Ladybug with haste.

\--

Ladybug watches the tiny white butterfly take to the air, rising high. Chat Noir’s gaze follows hers.

“Where do think they all go, after?” he asks. He twirls the staff in his right hand and places the staff in his left hand firmly against the rooftop, leaning heavily against it. His ring beeps, echoing the signal his body has already started to broadcast: it’s time to get out of here.

Ladybug’s smile is warm, her shrug carefree. It had been a good, clean battle. The Miraculous Ladybug charm hadn’t needed to clean up much in the way of damage by the end, just the one smashed up rooftop. “I don’t know. Hopefully somewhere nice, right?”

He feels a sharp stab of pain travel down his legs, through the arches of his feet. He presses the button on the left-side staff, extending it a bit higher. He throws the right-side staff down against the rooftop near its companion, ready to take off. “Yeah,” he agrees, throwing himself high into the air with a call of “see you!” over his shoulder.

He rolls in through his open window seconds before the magic gives out. Plagg lands hard on the floor, exhausted, and Adrien flops down next to him, his legs unable to support his weight without the bracing presence of the suit around his limbs. Adrien groans, and Plagg echoes him.

“Camembert,” Plagg pleads.

“Painkillers,” Adrien echoes. He grips the nearest forearm crutch in his hand and uses it to leverage himself a few inches off the carpet, at least enough to wiggle a hand into a hidden pocket and retrieve the cheese he always keeps there for emergencies. Plagg pounces on the food and consumes it in one noisy swallow.

As soon as the kwami is revived, he zips off toward the bathroom and returns with a bottle of Adrien’s painkillers. Adrien swallows them dry--not his preference, but Plagg is almost too tiny to carry the bottle of pills, let alone a big, heavy glass of water--and lies face-down on the carpet for nearly half an hour, waiting for them to kick in.

Plagg zips around his head a few times before sighing heavily and sitting in Adrien’s hair. Plagg bores easily, and he’s never so bored as when Adrien is like this, his physical energies completely maxed out, his brain too fuzzy with pain and medication to even listen to the kwami prattle on about cheese and whatever other nonsense he desires.

Adrien pushes himself into a sitting position, first, and then uses his crutches to scramble upright. The process is awkward and painful, and he’s barely managed it when Nathalie knocks on the door and enters without so much as a “by your leave.”

Her stoic expression doesn’t twitch a bit as she glances at him up and down, surveying. “Have you finished your homework?”

“Yeah,” Adrien assures her. He’d been able to get it done before the akuma attack hit, thank goodness.

Nathalie gives a small, sharp nod. “It’s late. You should be in bed.”

“Okay,” Adrien agrees. He breathes out a sigh of relief when she leaves and shuts the bedroom door behind him. “That was close. The last time one of them found me on the floor was a nightmare.”

“Stuck in here for _three days_,” Plagg agrees, shuddering. He’d been _really_ bored, then, and Adrien’s stash of cheese hadn’t lasted the whole of his grounding, either, to make matters even worse for the whiny kwami. 

Adrien ignores the small creature and makes his slow, painstaking way toward the bathroom to get ready for bed. His usual routine takes twice as long, and that’s cutting out the more arduous tasks such as showering and slipping his legs into a pair of pajama pants. He just strips down to his underwear, brushes his teeth, and swings himself toward his bed, flopping down on the perfectly made duvet with no attempt whatsoever at grace. 

“Tomorrow’s gonna be rough,” Adrien sighs, tossing the forearm crutches down on the floor, next to where he’s already discarded his braces in a heap. He should take better care of the devices, he knows, but right now he’s too tired to make the attempt.

“This would all be a lot easier to manage if you didn’t insist on going to school,” Plagg says. Not accusatory or sanctimonious about it, just matter-of-fact. The kwami knows going to a real school is important to Adrien. He knows that, for Adrien, there’s hardly a choice to be made.

Adrien doesn’t hear the statement, anyway. He’s already asleep.

\--

Nearly everyone Adrien has ever met has signed a non-disclosure contract. All his friends and teachers at school, every photographer he’s ever worked with, a few of the more observant personalities by whom he’s been interviewed--there’s stacks and stacks of those papers somewhere in his father’s lawyers’ files. Adrien thinks about those NDAs a lot, especially after receiving his miraculous. In more ways than one, Adrien has secrets. In more ways than one, Adrien lives a lie.

Adrien hates the word “manageable.” He hears it at least a dozen times every day. His pain is “manageable.” The twist in his limbs is “manageable.” His overburdened schedule is “manageable.” He is manageable in the way of a puppet. His father’s hands direct the strings. The same hands that refuse to pick him up when he falls down, that hesitate to touch him in any way at all unless there’s cameras there to witness it, move him to and fro at will. Sometimes, his threads are tugged too roughly, and he pays the price hung up in an uncoordinated heap--but never before the audience, never while on the stage. He’s a puppet that is allowed to tangle only in the shadows, hidden behind the scenes.

By the time he’s five years old, the photographers he works with are experts at maintaining his father’s lie. The clothing shoots Adrien endures are all portraits or full-body shots performed in faux-casual, reclining poses in which his limp, splayed legs appear natural. He models trousers with plenty of room in the leg until he’s ten; after his fourth surgery, though, he can wiggle into skinny jeans. He can never model outfits that reveal his legs below the knee, however--the surgical scars are too visible, even when densely covered with makeup. They dig deep gouges into his ankles and leave swathes of thick and gnarled tissue up his calves. (Father had called the surgeons in a fit, over that. Adrien remembers painstakingly writing a card to the doctors, after, thanking them for straightening out the bend in his bones. He’d begged Nathalie to send it without letting his father know. To this day, he’s still not sure if she actually sent his message or not.) 

Adrien’s secret makes his father selective. He works with only a handful of photographers, designers, and other big names in fashion. Adrien knows every one of them are professionals who are all just doing their jobs, but he still hates how they look at him, sometimes. The pages and makeup artists are uncomfortable with him, even after years of partnership in working on his father’s projects. Adrien feels more like a puppet then ever when he’s working. The photographers and designers talk over his head, as if he were more like a mannequin than a man. They constantly pick up and move his legs around without so much as a ‘by your leave,’ as if those parts of his body are mere props getting in the way of the perfect shot.

Adrien can still remember a well-meaning assistant wrenching his hips all wrong, trying to place him in a particular pose against some stairs. His yelp of pain had caused everyone within earshot to go still as stone in horror, rigid with an all-too-familiar unease. His coworkers are often afraid of his perceived fragility, afraid of what will happen to them if they should, God forbid, further damage Gabriel Agreste’s crippled son. He remembers smiling through the aftershocks of the rough treatment, assuring the poor page over and over again that he was “totally fine, really!” until the tears in her eyes abated and everyone else started breathing again. The rest of that shoot had been pure torture, but they’d gotten the pictures in before the sun came up. His abused joints had swollen up like balloons, though, and he’d had to hide from his father for days afterward, wary of getting anyone on set into trouble on his account.

His crutches are “manageable,” as they are loaded into the limo. His braces are “manageable” as he buckles himself into them in the morning and wiggles out of them at night. The medications--painkillers and muscle relaxants, the former which sometimes make him loopy and the latter which always make him nauseated--are “manageable.” But none of it is so “manageable” that he’s allowed his devices and medications on long bookings or during TV appearances or meetings with his father’s friends or members of the brand’s prestigious board. Adrien sits through live interviews and professional luncheons with his fingers digging into his aching thighs, beaming brightly as he talks through his teeth about nonsense like fencing lessons and rock climbing and a hundred other tiny lies laid to reinforce the facade that he is, in fact, a real boy and not a puppet with shattered, splintered pieces and tangled, fraying strings.

\--

He spends the entirety of his morning before school pretending to feel better than he does. He forces himself to swing with accuracy and speed down the hall and into the elevator, to respond to Nathalie’s inquiries with pep and a genuine-looking smile. He hides a wince when the pain sparks through him as the Gorilla bustles him into the back seat of the limo and his knees have to bend fully to achieve it. He hides the tremble of exhaustion in his fingers as he deftly rebuckles the braces and slips his arms into the cradle of his crutches. He even puts all of his weight on one side so as to wave goodbye as the car drives away.

Nino appears at the exact right moment and catches Adrien’s weight against his own shoulder when Adrien’s knees go out, the joints slamming hard against the unrelenting vertical bars of his leg braces. The jarring sensation sends another new flare of hot pain up and down his legs, but it’s better than overbalancing and falling onto the concrete.

“Hey, dude,” Nino says, brightly. He doesn’t ask Adrien if he’s ‘okay’ when he’s obviously not, anymore, not since Adrien asked him to cut that out. That’s what Adrien loves most about having friends--having _his_ friends, especially; they listen to him.

Adrien situates his crutches more firmly under himself and carefully pulls his weight back onto his heels, finding his balance again. Nino waits for his nod of confirmation before pulling back and away. He steps back a bit, careful not to look like he’s hovering. 

“Sorry,” Adrien says, with a wry smile. “I overdid it yesterday.”

“No problem,” Nino says, genuinely as always. “Hey, did you finish your Chemistry assignment? ‘Cos I’m totally confused. I could really use some help.”

Adrien allows the obvious change in subject to go by without comment. “Yeah! Don’t worry, it’s easier than it looks.”

“Good, because it _looks_ impossible.”

Adrien grins at him, starting to swing his way toward the handicap accessible ramp to the door. It’s narrow (probably too narrow to be up to code, if Adrien’s eyeballing is correct), so Nino has to file behind him like a duckling as they ascend. “Aw, c’mon,” Adrien says, brightly, “Nothing is impossible, you know that.” Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Alya wander over to Adrien and Nino during their impromptu tutoring session. 

“Hi, Nino,” Alya says brightly, kissing her boyfriend on the cheek in greeting. Her eyes scan over the open textbook on his lap. She grimaces in sympathy. “Oh, yeah, that chapter was hard.”

“Totally. Adrien’s explanation helps, though. Did I do this one right?” He and Alya then fall into an easy back-and-forth.

Marinette looks at Adrien while studiously attempting to not look as if she’s looking at him. Marinette is shy. Adrien’s not even sure that she likes him, half the time, though she’s quick to assure him otherwise. She’s always so nervous around him. He figures she’s just like the people at his photoshoots: Scared of his braces and his crutches and his pain. That’s all right. She’s still nice to him, so he doesn’t hold her irrational fear against her.

“Hi, Marinette.”

She swallows and makes a tiny waving gesture at him in greeting. “Uhm, hi, Adrien! You look--I mean, you always look--I, uhm.”

Adrien smiles at her. He’s aware he probably doesn’t look so hot. He’s still sweaty from the physical strain of walking around on overworked legs, and he hadn’t slept well the night before because of sporadic muscle spasms and cramps. Even Nathalie must have noticed the dark circles under his eyes, if nothing else. “Yeah, I’m kind of tired,” he agrees, casually. He doesn’t want to make her feel badly for telling him he looks terrible. Marinette’s tact tends to go out the window when he’s around. “_You_ look good. Is that a new bracelet?”

Marinette makes a high, squeaky noise, clasping her opposite hand reflexively around said bracelet. “Uhm. Yeah! I, uh, I made it, actually.”

Adrien knows Marinette has a lot of talent. She made him a lucky charm, once. He keeps it threaded through the topmost strap of one his leg braces, high on the side of his thigh. The beads make a funny, repetitive racket against the straps when he walks, but he doesn’t mind. He’s glad to be reminded that someone cares about him and wishes him the best. Marinette’s eyes drift to the charm now, in fact, and her face goes red. Embarrassed because of the braces, probably. Adrien calmly shifts his weight in his chair, hiding his legs under the table and out of her sight. “It’s really pretty,” he repeats, levelly. 

“T-thanks,” she replies, and her smile is bright and happy. Adrien grins back at her, pleased. He likes to be a good friend and make his friends happy. Marinette is always more difficult than the others to please because she so obviously feels awkward when he’s around. That unselfconscious grin feels like a victory. It’s enough to make dragging himself to school worth the trouble.

\--

When Adrien was a child, he closed his eyes and gripped the hand of a stranger--nurses, usually, dressed in neon-patterned scrubs and strange looking shoes--while doctors laid hot, melty sheets of plastic over the expanse of his bent and atrophied legs. The material burned his skin at first touch, and he hated the sensation of the polymer going stiff and uncompromising against his skin as the long, uncomfortable minutes passed him by. 

Every six months for ten whole years, Adrien was brought to that same clinic to endure the same treatment, fitted over and over again for new braces to fit snugly around his legs, forcing them inch by inch to straighten, to lengthen, to be normal and right. The molten plastic braces were thick and hot. Despite being fitted so carefully to the contours of his body, the polymer rubbed against his heels and knees, leaving terrible, red-raw welts. 

Each time he complained to his father about it, he met only resistance.

“Don’t you want to walk properly someday?” he’d ask, and that always shut the conversation down with ease. 

Adrien dreamed of physical feats like dancing and running and going up flights and flights of stairs. More than anything, he’d wanted to move normally, to experience a day without pain and the terrible embarrassment of being put together all wrong.

His mother would come into his room, sometimes, before bed, and she would rub a cool and soothing ointment against his angry, irritated skin. She’d press her palms against the bend in his calves, sometimes, too, as if she might be able to straighten them out with her strength alone. She couldn’t, of course. The pressure of her hands made Adrien ache in his heart as much as his limbs.

\--

When he was ten going on eleven, a newly hired specialist frowned deeply over Adrien’s latest x-rays and asked, in confusion, “You realize much of the disparity could be resolved with a simple surgery, do you not?”

An initial surgery as a baby, to correct the set of his displaced hips. A second surgery as a toddler, to lengthen the Achilles tendons. A third surgery a few years later, to readdress the arthrogryposis in his knees. And then, at age ten, a final surgery to break and reset long bones that had been since birth fused in a bent position and set incorrectly at the joints. That was a defect that had stubbornly not responded to ten years of nonsurgical treatments and rigid, painful plastic braces...because the underlying issue had, years ago, been misdiagnosed.

Adrien tries very hard not to resent those awful molten-plastic braces and every doctor who ever laid them perfunctorily against his young and tender skin. He tries not to think about the decade of time wasted on solutions to a problem that didn’t exist. He tries not to wonder, too much, how he might have improved, physically, if the true problem had been noticed when he was a baby and not then, as child nearing adolescence. He fails on all counts. But he does try.

\--

Chat Noir digs his dual staffs into the soft grass of the park and uses them to leap forward in long, rapid bursts. It’s a move Adrien utilizes daily to cross vast expanses of ground in a short amount of time, and the tactic works just as well on the field of battle with two expandable metal staffs as it does with two forearm crutches when just going about his day. It’s not a particularly catlike motion, but it’s effective for moving around quickly mid-battle. Besides, he doesn’t like the sensation of running entirely on his legs with no counterbalance to support him. Chat Noir could certainly run without assistance, if he wanted. But Adrien isn’t used to relying solely on his legs for support, and it leaves him feeling uncertain and frozen on the field, neither of which are useful in the midst of a fight.

Ladybug makes a sound of frustration beside him. After a moment of hesitation, Chat tosses her one of his staffs. At the moment, she needs it more than he does. She catches onto his intentions quickly despite her obvious surprise; she’s worked with him long enough to know how territorial he is over his weapons. With a grunt, she spins in the air and uses the borrowed weapon like a baseball bat, throwing some of their akumatized foe’s tiny magiced henchmen high into the air. 

“Ugh! I hate these stupid pixie things!” Ladybug grouses. They swarm around the park like large gnats. Adrien can hardly see the akuma victim through the haze of big, dragonfly-esque wings.

Chat Noir squares up and bats his remaining staff at the swarm. He swings one handed in wide, back and forth arcs, unwilling to take on the full-body, baseball-style approach that Ladybug has adopted. His way is a lot more messy and a lot less effective, but Ladybug doesn’t comment on it. She’s probably too busy bashing one of the pixies into a tree to critic his lack of style.

“We have to get closer! I’ll never be able to release the akuma at this rate!”

Chat Noir nods. “I’m on it!” he promises, and he takes off at a loping run, using his staff every other step to catapult him several feet forward at a time. He feels unsteady, and he wonders if that’s obvious to Ladybug’s shrewd eye. It’s rare he goes off with only one of his weapons in hand. He’s potentially incapicitated himself in order to give Ladybug an advantage. 

Ladybug sighs in frustration and starts to spin her yoyo in her free hand while still bashing against the attackers with Chat’s staff with the other. Now armed with a faux sword and shield, she tanks through the swarm, following Chat’s progression across the park and to their foe.

She gets there just as the akuma victim--a tall, storybook-type figure calling herself Tatiana, like the fae queen--yanks Chat’s remaining staff from his hand. He lurches after it but to no avail, stymied by the swarming pixies. Ladybug calls out in belated warning as Tatiana extends the staff to a walking-stick length and then promptly takes Chat out hard at the legs. The resulting _snap_ of contact echoes across the park.

Chat Noir falls to the ground as Ladybug throws herself at their foe. She yanks the ornate headdress off the woman’s head and smashes it on the ground. Chat loses track of what’s going on around him after that, made senseless for the moment by pain. It’s rare he suffers while in the suit. He usually revels in the relief the miraculous provides, otherwise completely unaccustomed to a pain free existence. (He’d wanted to wear the suit all the time, at first. Only Plagg’s whining about the misuse of power and kwami worker’s rights had kept him from it). Somewhere along the line, though, Ladybug must throw her Miraculous Ladybug charm into the air. The pain shuts off abruptly like water from a tap, from agonized to aching in a single blink. Ladybug turns to Chat and falls to her knees where he lies on his back in the long, green grass. 

“Chat?” she asks, poking his shoulder with uncertainty. “Are you--are you hurt?”

His ring beeps. He groans as his eyes open. Ladybug helps him to sit up. “I’m fine, my lady. Where are--?”

She hands him both of his staffs from where they had fallen. He grins at her. “Thanks.”

She watches worriedly as Chat uses both of the staffs as support, leveraging himself up onto his feet. His motions are slow and stiff, and even once upright he stands off-kilter, all of his weight braced on his arms and hands rather than through the line of his body up and down. It’s how Adrien stands, balanced hard against the support of his crutches, forced straight-legged by the stiffness of his braces.

“Are you sure--?” Ladybug starts, but he interrupts her.

“I gotta go,” he says, overly bright. He takes a step forward and can’t quite hide the grimace that flashes over his face.

“Chat--!” she says, going to him, but he swings backward on the staffs, stepping away from her. He doesn’t put any weight at all on his legs as he swings around the obstacle of her body. She reaches out to him, obviously desperate to help, but he’s already extending his staff and flying off and away along the rooftops of Paris. He hopes she won’t worry, too much.

He’ll be fine.

\--

The suit bleeds off of him and Adrien staggers bonelessly onto the bed, thankful he’d been able to reach it before the magic entirely wore off. He lies on his back on top of the duvet, panting in sharp, shallow breaths. Tears prickle reflexively up in his eyes. His legs spasm. His hamstrings bunch tight in a charlie horse. His right foot curls without his permission into an angry-looking scrunch as the small muscles there clench tight and refuse to let go. The toes of his left foot splay unnaturally, held against his will in that position by angry and retaliating muscles. Sparks of vicious, stabbing pain slash up his spine as his nerves riot. One of his hips feels all wrong, like there’s a literal knot floating in the joint of the bone. He knows if he can twist the limb just right, it will pop and the uncomfortable pressure will be released, but he’s unable to even think of pulling off such a complicated maneuver on his own, right now. He doesn’t dare move for fear that he might trigger even more of his muscles to seize up, a catastrophic chain of events like dominos spilling down a line. 

The pain is excruciating. The tentative sparks up his spine soon twitch into a full blown back spasm and he’s left feeling abruptly suffocated, the pain locking up his lungs, causing him to forget how to breathe. This happens, sometimes, when he’s drunk or eaten something too fast and failed to pace his breathing properly, but he’s never experienced the sensation while sprawled flat on his back, unable to ease the straining muscles by bending forward or twisting side-to-side.

Adrien is dimly aware of Plagg flying around him, talking rapidly, but he can’t make out the kwami’s words. Plagg disappears from his line of sight and suddenly there’s a loud, resounding crash as something falls to the floor and, apparently, shatters into bits. Adrien hears footsteps coming down the hall within minutes.

Nathalie doesn’t touch him, typically, but her hands are cold, now, as she cups one of them over the top of his twitching knee. He can hear her on the phone, the stoicism in her voice as ironclad as ever. He respects her for that, most days. He spends their longer, quieter hours together telling dumb jokes and throwing out puns, always hoping to trick her into cracking even the slightest of smiles. Sometimes, he even succeeds.

She is definitely not smiling now, though.

He loses time, maybe, because the next thing he knows his physical therapist and his most recently acquired personal physician are in his bedroom. The latter pokes a syringe of something into his arm. The former turns him gently onto his back and starts to dig her thumbs into the tight knots of his hamstrings, forcing them to release. The drug in his system acts quickly, washing over him with a sensation of numbness that eradicates the pain. His PT’s sure hands rub in long, deep strokes over his limbs, forcing the muscles to warm and stretch until he feels loose and detached in both body and mind. 

He remembers, hazily, asking for his father. 

Nathalie pats him stiffly on the shoulder and tells him to sleep. So, he does.

\--

His next three photoshoots are cancelled, and he’s forbidden to go back to school for a whole week.

He spends most of his days staring blankly at Plagg, pretending to listen to the kwami’s complaints even as the noise flows in one ear and out the other. He finds himself often sitting rigidly in silence with his fingertips digging hard into the flesh of his useless legs. Plagg takes to sitting on his lap whenever possible, preventing his hands from moving of their own volition toward the battered limbs.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Plagg says abruptly one morning as Adrien pokes his eggs listlessly around his plate. He’s been brought breakfast on a bed tray. He misses the big, empty dining room table downstairs more than he thought he would.

Adrien blinks at him. This isn’t the kind of conversation he and the kwami have, most of the time. Plagg hardly ever talks about Adrien’s feelings in any capacity, actually, if he can help it. 

“You were chosen. You think you’re the first hero ever to be like you? I’ve worked with bunches of other heroes over the years, you know. What makes you think you’re the first one with limitations? It doesn’t make you less worthy. It doesn’t make what you’ve done for Paris less important. Get over yourself.”

Adrien frowns at Plagg’s wording, but he mulls the message over, all the same.

“Paris deserves better. What if an akuma attacks and I can’t help because I’m--I’m--.” Adrien can’t find the right words, can’t force them into existence in the world. He tries so hard not to be the kind of person who feels restricted by his disability; he learned early on in his life that that kind of wallowing wasn’t allowed, wasn’t permitted. He had to be strong and capable and, and _manageable_. And now he’s failed. He has allowed himself to fall victim to his pain. His father hasn’t made an appearance, yet. Adrien knows, deep down, it’s because Gabriel Agreste is ashamed. 

Plagg rambs himself bodily against Adrien’s hands. “Give me cheese. I’m hungry.”

Adrien snorts. That, at least, is a familiar part of he and Plagg’s relationship, far more comfortable than the discussion of emotion or duty. He slowly gets to his feet and shuffles over to their hidden stash, opening the heavy door for Plagg. The kwami can have a free-for-all feast, if he wants. Adrien is too stiff to bend down and ration off a single wedge from the pile like he normally would. 

To his surprise, Plagg contents himself with his usual single piece and swallows it down thickly before flittering up and nesting in Adrien’s hair. “Let’s lie back down again,” the kwami demands. “I want to take a nap.” Adrien decides against reminding the kwami that they both woke up not even two hours ago. There are worse ways to while away the time than sleeping.

\--

When he arrives back at school on Monday of the next week, Adrien finds a sky-blue envelope taped to the front of his locker. It has his name written on it in green ink, the writing oddly familiar to him. Inside he finds a homemade card. It’s covered in doodles and signatures, obviously done by his classmates and even a few of his teachers. _We’re glad you’re back!_ the card says, in the same handwriting as is on the envelope. It doesn’t take Adrien long to find that handwriting again. _Marinette_, her signature says. It’s crammed into a corner on the back page, hidden away as if in apology. It’s one of the very few names on the card without an accompanying drawing to go with it. It doesn’t take long for Adrien to realize, though, that its Marinette who’s made the card and its envelope from scratch. He recognizes her style in the tiny flowers laid out in glitter pen all over the envelope and the scalloped edges of the card itself, carefully rimmed with gold paint.

Marinette is such a good friend. They all are.

Adrien swallows against the threatening knot in his throat. He looks around and then slips the open card into his bag, letting Plagg get a look.

“Ugh, sentimentality,” the kwami grumbles, but Adrien doesn’t believe him for a minute.

Nino waves to Adrien as he swings his way into the classroom. “Dude, it’s been so boring without you.”

Adrien smiles, warmed by the simple, casual statement. He knows that his friends care about him, sure, but it’s still so good to be reminded that his presence matters, that his friends wouldn’t forget him even if his father does someday decide to shut him away for all eternity, safe and stagnant in the house. (Adrien pushes that thought aside, like always. His father wouldn’t do that. He’s fine.)

“H-ow are you feeling, Adrien?” Marinette asks. 

Adrien can’t turn easily in his seat, inhibited by the forcibly straightened position of his legs and the limited mobility of his spine. Marinette caught on to this issue early after their first meeting, though, and is currently leaning far into the aisle so he doesn’t have to twist as much to meet her face to face. She looks ridiculous, maybe, but she doesn’t seem to care about that. She’s more concerned with his comfort instead of her dignity. Marinette is a good friend.

“I’m okay. I’m sorry if I worried anyone. I--,” he pauses only a moment, “--had a bad fall. My father made me stay home to make sure I fully recovered.” He tries not to let his displeasure bleed into his voice. It’s not like his father had been wrong; there’s no way Adrien could have managed long, wearying days sitting at his desk and moving from class to class in the state that last akuma fight had left him in. Even so, Adrien had missed this, had missed the normalcy of school and friends and idle chatter before their lessons.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, now,” Marinette says, and it’s the first time in ages that she’s managed to get a full sentence out at him without stammering or saying something odd. 

“Thanks for the card. It matters a lot to me. Thanks everyone, obviously, but you, especially, Marinette. You must have spent a long time on it. It’s beautiful.”

Marinette’s tentative composure falls away to dust before his eyes. She blushes a deep rosy red and mumbles out something entirely incomprehensible. It’s only by the grace of Alya that she doesn’t go careening, overbalanced, onto the floor. Adrien’s pretty sure he catches a “thanks, you too” in there, somewhere, which is a sweet, if baffling, response.

Adrien turns back to the board as Mrs. Bustier begins the day’s lesson. 

And then, perhaps predictably, an akumatized villain attacks.

\--

“Chat!” Ladybug calls in greeting. She swings down to meet him where he swings around in the street, shooing civilians off the open expanse and toward the safer security of the nearby buildings. 

Chat Noir offers her a distracted wave, already running in the opposite direction. He picks up a small, startled girl and uses his staff to leap forward, pushing the child into her mother’s waiting arms even as a lamppost comes crashing down where she’d stood moments before. Chat bares his teeth at the akuma victim, a goblin-esque creature soaring through the sky on some sort of hoverboard.

“Do you ever feel a creeping sense of _déjà vu_ about these fights, my lady?” Chat asks as he catapults himself neatly back to her side. “See a villain, stop a villain, save Paris, do it all again.” He effects an exaggerated yawn.

Ladybug shoots him a wry glance even as she begins to twirl her yoyo. He suspects she intends to lasso the villain right off its hoverboard. (He’s right.) “Only you could ever find the superhero gig boring, Chat Noir. What would you rather be doing right now? Chasing lasers? Napping in a box?” She pauses, coyly. “Hazing a cheeseburger?”

Chat snorts at the outdated joke. “No,” he says, watching with interest as she successfully loops her yoyo around the gobin’s ankle. Unfortunately, instead of tugging the creature down to the ground, Ladybug finds herself pulled up by the villain in turn, dragged right off her feet. Chat sheaths his staffs in his belt and leaps up, wrapping himself bodily around her ankles, providing a counterweight. “I just,” he grunts, swinging wildly side to side along with Ladybug as the goblin tries to shake them of, “think that,” he yelps as Ladybug accidentally (probably) kicks him in the chin, “we’ve got this,” another soft grunt of effort “hero-ing thing down.” Chat braces himself for impact as Ladybug gains the advantage and sends them all--cat, ladybug, goblin, and sputtering hoverboard--to the ground. 

“Everybody knows we’re going to win. Where’s the fun in that?” Chat asks or, more, wheezes, under the combined weight of Ladybug and the supervillain squirming in her arms. 

Ladybug bashes the goblin’s head hard against the stones. The helmet on its head shatters, and an akuma flies out. She rolls to her feet and has it purified in seconds. 

Chat Noir smiles reassuringly as possible at the confused-looking victim--a wizened old man wearing coke-bottle glasses--still sprawled over the top of him. “Hi,” Chat says. He pulls a staff from his belt and uses the length of it to get himself and the gentleman on their feet. 

Ladybug performs her cleansing charm. The lamppost rights itself, and a few other smaller instances of collateral damage disappear entirely as if they’d never been. Clean slate, again and again and again. 

His ring beeps. Chat hisses in a breath and immediately throws the end of his second staff against the ground, leaning as casually as possible on them both, lifting the more painful of his two legs off the ground. “Speaking of routine. I gotta--.”

“--Can you take the man home? Or at least help him get to somewhere safe?” Ladybug asks. She has her hand over one ear, probably also nearing the end of her allotted time.

Chat rocks his weight awkwardly from staff to staff. “I don’t know if I--” he begins, but Ladybug’s earrings beep again and she backs several steps away with a loud, worried squeak.

“Okay, great, thank you, ‘bye!” and she swings off.

Chat sighs. “Yeah, okay,” he says. He turns to the old man stooped near him. “Well, _monsieur_! Is there someplace I can take you, today? Or someone we can call to come and get you?”

The old man mutters something in reply, and the two of them back-and-forth for several long, excruciating seconds before Chat begins to understand him. “Oh, right! Yeah, we can do that, easy. Let’s just--.”

Chat’s ring beeps again, the final dot flashing in and out of existence. His legs buckle without the study line of his leg braces to keep them straight. A stabbing sensation lances down his thighs and he chokes on it, held up only by the length of his staffs pressing hard against the ground.

“Chat Noir?” 

He blinks through eyes hazy with reactionary tears. A woman he vaguely recognizes--a civilian they’ve rescued before, no doubt--looks back at him. Her hand is on his shoulder, closing warmly around it. She doesn’t comment on the fact that right now she’s actively holding him upright. He smiles at her apologetically and leans into the touch.

“I know this man,” she tells him, earnestly. “I can take him home.”

“You don’t have to--,” he begins, but his staff slips and the resulting twinge of pain causes him to cut himself off with a barely smothered whimper. The old man has roused himself a bit, now, and also stares at him with wide, worried eyes. Chat tries not to die of mortification as the old man’s wrinkled palms join the woman’s, pressing flat against his leather-bound chest, holding him upright. 

“We’re safe, Chat Noir,” another voice says, urgently. “Go home.” There’s a small crowd amassing around him, by now.

He swallows thickly, the tears in his eyes borne of emotion, now, and nods. “Thanks,” he says, and means it. “I, uh, owe you one.”

And then he swings back from the gentle hands against him and extends his staffs, throwing himself high, high into the air to tumble gracelessly, out of sight, onto a flat expanse of a rooftop. 

His suit bleeds away. He turns with difficulty onto his back, clutching at legs that threaten to descend into a series of wracking spasms, again. Plagg bustles into his line of sight, eyes wide, ears twitching. 

“Oh, man. You’re not going to break down again, are you? Not here. Do you even have any cheese, up here?”

Adrien snorts at his kwami and digs the camembert out of his jean pocket. Plagg descends on it with fervor while Adrien continues to sprawl uselessly on the concrete, trying to keep his body relaxed as he recovers. If he holds still long enough, the approaching threat of spasms will ease, and he’ll be able to--somehow--get off this roof and back to the school. 

Somehow.

\--

“C’mon, Plagg. It’s just a few blocks!”

“I’m telling you, I’m pooped! One measly morsel of cheese isn’t enough. I can’t suit up, right now. Maybe in several hours.”

“Several--I can’t lie around up here for _hours_! Plagg! You lazy--.”

“--I’m not lazy! Well, I am. But I’m not being lazy right now. I’m serious. I can’t manifest again without either a long sleep or significantly more delicious cheese. Sorry.”

Adrien groans and clambors into a sitting position. He digs his crutches into the rooftop and tries to leverage himself to his feet to no avail. He, too, is bone-tired. He needs help--human help, apparently--if he’s going to be getting off this rooftop any time before nightfall.

Adrien pulls his phone from his pocket, already rapidly forming a series of lies in his head. 

He stares at the screen. It would make the most sense to call Nathalie or the Gorilla. But if he does, the whole situation will eventually get back to his father, and while Adrien is confident in his ability to hide the truth, he doesn’t look forward to being on the receiving end of his father’s cool, disappointed gaze. And his only son needing to be rescued like a cat in a tree? That’s definitely going to disappoint Gabriel Agreste. 

Throwing most of the adults in his life out of the equation leaves only his friends from school. Adrien flicks through his contact list. Nino? No, Nino is a good friend, but he’ll definitely draw attention; he’s awful at deception and not subtle in the least. Chloe? Definitely, definitely not. She won’t be willing to come get him herself, and he’ll probably end up with the entirety of Paris’s rescue forces on his head, instead, and that will get back to his father in minutes. Alya? Dependable, capable, but she’s also incredibly shrewd and unlikely to take his lies at face value; he doesn’t trust his ability to keep his secret identity underwraps with Alya on the case. He similarly dismisses several others for various reasons and sighs, nearly ready to accept defeat and call Nathalie, after all.

Then, his thumb hovers over another name, and he pauses.

Marinette. Marinette is clumsy, but he knows she’s clever enough to make up for any trouble a lack of brawn might present in this sticky situation. Moreover, she’s discreet. She’d never tell anyone what happened, if he asked her not to. And she won’t be suspicious of him, either. She always gives him the benefit of the doubt, whether he deserves it or not. 

Feeling a small twinge of guilt, Adrien nevertheless nods to himself, decided. Marinette is his only hope.

He sends a text instead of calling, well aware that she might be in class, again, now that everything has settled down post the akuma attack. 

_Marinette? This is Adrien. Can you do me a favor? _

An exceedingly long pause follows, in which Adrien nervously starts to consider his second-best options. Then, abruptly:

_Adrien! We’re all looking for you. Of course I’ll help! Any time, Adrien!! What is it?_

\--

Adrien has never felt such an overwhelming sense of relief as he does when Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s familiar, pigtailed head pops up over the edge of the top-story ladder. She scrambles awkwardly up onto the roof and then offers him a jittery wave and a smile that is far too wide for the circumstances, probably.

Adrien just grins helplessly back at her, pleased in every sense to see his friend and soon-to-be rescuer in his moment of need. “I’m really sorry about this,” he says, and he prepares himself to launch into the lie he’s spent the last half hour carefully crafting in his head to explain why he, Adrien Agreste, is currently stranded on a roof.

Marinette makes a small noise, lifting her hands and waving them rapidly at him. “No, no, it’s fine! It’s no trouble! Of course it’s, you know, no big deal! I’m just so happy to help you! Really. You can--I’d always. I mean. You. Not that you, you need any help, necessarily! I mean, you obviously do right now, but I don’t mean that I think you might need help any other time but now. It’s not--I just--You’re not helpless.”

Adrien blinks at her, slowly. He can almost hear Plagg’s muttered reaction to Marinette’s nervous blabbering just on the edge of his hearing. He cups his hand over his overshirt, muffling the tiny noise, just in case. “I need help standing up. And getting down from here, too.”

Marinette immediately cuts off, red cheeked. She nods vigorously. “Right! No problem! Just, uhm, tell me what to do?”

Adrien walks her through the process of getting him upright. It involves a lot of stammering and apologizing and blushing on Marinette’s part, but she manages. Despite her obvious discomfort with touching him, she’s far more competent than many well-meaning folks who have man-handled Adrien in his life. Her touch is sure and strong, and she’s careful to check in with him and make sure she’s doing more good than harm. Adrien huffs out a heavy breath of relief once he is fully upright of his own power, leaning hard on his staffs and no longer relying on Marinette to stand.

“Thanks,” he tells her, a bit breathlessly. He’s well past his limits. His muscles tremor minutely with the effort of simply standing still. 

Marinette hums distractedly. Her eyes are roving over the rooftop.

“Marinette?”

“Hm? Oh. Sorry. I’m just trying to figure out the easiest way down. I don’t think we should try the ladder, do you?”

Adrien hesitates. The ladder is the most expedient option. He knows if he tells Marinette he can handle it, she’ll take him at his word. The problem, though, is that he _can’t _handle it. Even if he weren’t entirely exhausted, he’d find the structure of the ladder impossible to use.

He sighs and idly pats the place where Plagg is hiding. If only he could claws out. Chat Noir wouldn’t need the ladder. He could just jump right off the roof and land on his feet.

Marinette, in lieu of getting a response out of him, walks across the roof and peers down. She makes another soft “hm” noise.

“Uh, Marinette?” he questions. She’s not going to suggest they try this the Chat Noir way, is she?

Marinette turns to look at him, speculative. She glances at him up and down, a thoughtful expression on his face. For one brief moment, he feels seen in a way that is both mortifying and thrilling. Marinette looks at him like he’s, he’s...what. An art piece? No. Something more functional, useful. Like a piece of a larger puzzle, or an integral component of a vast and churning machine. Adrien’s skin breaks out in goosebumps. He shudders, and the motion rattles the rubber tips of his crutches against the concrete.

“Can you explain your range of motion to me?” Marinette asks. Her tone is curious. “How far can you bend your knees and hips without pain?” Adrien would typically find this line of questioning invasive if not outright condescending, but in this case he can recognize the question for what it is: Marinette, exploring all of her viable options. He recognizes this feeling intimately. It’s like working with Ladybug when she’s finding the perfect use for her Lucky Charm.

He leans his weight to one side and lifts a leg, bending his knee to demonstrate. “About to there.” He lowers his hands on the crutches, foregoing the arm cuffs, and bends at the waist. He winces slightly and manages a tight “And there.” When he keeps his legs straight, the strain up his back and down his calves caused by bending forward is immense. He’s certainly never going to be able to touch his toes. 

Marinette touches his arm, gently guiding him upright. “Okay,” she says, determinedly. “So, no bending at the hip, huh?” 

Adrien gives her a wry smile. “Maybe not. Not unless I can bend my knees, too. Which is a good thing. Otherwise, I’d never be able to sit down.” Marinette’s expression goes distant again. “Right,” she agrees, faintly. She frowns a bit in thought and takes off her jacket. She rolls the cuffed, polka-dotted sleeves down as far as she can. She drops it to the ground.

Adrien blinks at her. “What are you--?”

“The ladder is the foldable kind,” Marinette interrupts. 

“So?” Adrien asks, tilting his head.

“So, it can fold up against the wall and out of the way. But these ladders are also made to help residents escape in the case of a fire or other disaster--and sometimes you can’t go down to the ground because of debris or the spread of the fire or whatever. In those cases, it’s safer and faster to move from building to building via rooftop, instead.”

Adrien stares at her. “Are you--?”

Marinette is already standing over the ladder, grunting softly as she tugs it into its folded position. Then, she proceeds to carefully slide the horizontal ladder out until it hits the brick wall on the other side of the alley. It drops a good foot lower than the other side of the ladder, but Adrien can see how an able-bodied person might walk across the top of it like a bridge and jump up onto the other roof. “Tada!” she calls, brightly, once her task is complete. “I...Marinette, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that,” he says, gesturing in a way to somehow encapsulate the concept of walking across the newly made bridge.

“Oh! I know. Can I borrow these?” Marinette asks, pointing at but not touching his crutches.

Adrien reflexively tightens his grip on them. “Uhm, maybe. I can’t walk or stand without them.”

She nods. “I know. I’m going to help you sit on the edge of the roof, for a bit, while I borrow them.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

Marinette makes that distant “hm?” noise again, but when she finally focuses on him, her expression swiftly goes apologetic. “I’m sorry! I’m not trying to make you nervous. I’m going to make a kind of, uhm, zip line. Your crutches are going to be the line part. And my jacket is going to be the zip. Or are the crutches the zip and the jacket the line? I don’t really know the jargon,” she admits, with a small “heehee” of a giggle.

Adrien’s eyes widen, impressed. “Can you do that? Build something like that so easily, I mean?”

Marinette nods. “Sure! The crutches are perfect, actually, because we can use the clamp thingies that go around your arm to attach them to the bars on the ladder. It won’t be very strong, though. So we definitely can’t do this more than once.”

Adrien frowns at her. “Marinette, not that I don’t trust you, but--.”

Marinette grips his shoulder. He startles. She never touches him like this, without flinching or tensing up. He’s always assumed that she found it scary, touching someone so fragile. She certainly wouldn’t be the first. But she grips his arm now with intensity, completely unafraid. She meets his eyes. “I would never do anything to put anyone in danger, especially you. It’s safe, I promise.”

And he believes her. And her loves her? No. Not that, surely. He loves Ladybug, and--.

“You can have the crutches,” he tells her. 

She smiles at him, bright as the sun. “Great! Let’s go this way, then.” She leads him to the edge of the roof and eases him down into a sitting position. “Okay?”

He nods. “Okay,” he agrees, though his voice is thin. He shudders against her as she guides his limbs into a comfortable position. He expects her to let go and get to work immediately, but instead she situates herself next to him, close enough their shoulders brush. They take a break together, staring out over Paris, unseen and unheard, entirely invisible. He and Ladybug have been together just like this many times before, when on patrol.

“Are you really not going to ask me how I ended up here?” Adrien asks, after a long beat of companionable silence between them.

Marinette startles at the sound of his voice. For the first time in a while, she blushes and goes shy on him again. “Oh, w-well. I mean, I didn’t want to--.”

“I know I say it a lot. But I hope you know I mean it. You’re a great friend, Marinette.”

She smiles at him, crookedly. “Thanks,” she all but sighs, her eyes going soft. She blinks and visibly pulls herself together. “Okay. I should get to building, huh? Times a’wasting.”

Adrien watches as she locks the crutches firmly onto the bottom of the ladder, tying the ends firmly together with what Adrien only belatedly realizes are the hair ribbons from her pigtails. Her hair falls loose and Adrien marvels at how different she looks that way. Finally, Marinette ties her jacket firmly around the crutch by its sleeves. She secures the loop over the bump of the crutch’s rivet to keep the jacket from sliding down the slight incline of the ladder. She looks at Adrien. “Uhm, so. Now we have to get you into this,” she says, pointing at the jacket.

“Easier said than done,” Adrien says.

“Easier done than not done,” Marinette adds, firmly. “You can lean on me however you need.”

Adrien takes her at her word on that. He’s right, though. The task of scooting him a few inches down the edge of the roof and sliding into the cradle of the jacket is massive, and they are both panting for air by the end of it. Adrien is also tearing up in pain and not hiding it successfully at all. Marinette makes a sympathetic face at him, but she pushes it aside, adopting a casual expression of assurance, instead.

“Okay! That was...not impossible. Are you ready?”

Adrien swallows thickly, staring determinedly across the way at the far wall and absolutely _not_ looking down. “Ready.”

“Okay. _Un, deux, trois_\--!”

She releases the jacket from the rivet and gives Adrien’s back and light nudge. Gravity does the rest. Like a zip line, Adrien slides from the high part of the slope to the lower. He bangs lightly against the wall. It jars him, but he was expecting it, so the pain is marginal compared to his baseline.

As soon as he’s hit the wall safely, Marinette hops up onto the top of the ladder and makes quick work of crossing it. It teeters shakily under her weight, and the crutches seem apt to fall off at any minute--as Marinette said, they wouldn’t want to try that trick twice. Marinette stumble-leaps onto the new rooftop and reaches out for Adrien’s arms. She tugs and he scrambles and they manage to haul him over the edge and safely onto the flat expanse of the new roof. Marinette, by necessity, leaves him to his own devices while she quickly retrieves the crutches and her jacket before they fall. She’s not quick or agile enough to save her hair ribbons, however. Adrien watches as the red strips flutter the long way down to the dark, grimy alley ground. To add insult to injury, they land in a murky looking puddle. 

“Sorry,” he says as she hands him his crutches and slips her jacket back on.

“It’s okay. I’ve been thinking I should try a new look, anyway,” she says, giving her loose hair a shake. She grins at him, obviously joking.

He grins back and, with help, gets back on his feet and his crutches under him. This time, though, when Marinette tries to step away, he finds his knees buckling. She barely catches him in time. 

“Oops,” she says.

“I’m useless,” he tells her, sincerely. 

Her face goes abruptly stormy. He’s never actually seen Marinette so irritated, before, except maybe in her worst confrontations with Chloe. “Don’t say that,” she tells him, firmly. “Not ever, Adrien Agreste.”

He swallows back the sudden lump in his throat and, once again, cannot hide the dampness in his eyes. “Uhm. Thanks.”

She grips his arms more firmly. “There’s an workmen’s elevator on this roof,” she says, gesturing to the side with her chin. He can see the shape of a boxy, old-fashioned elevator with a grate door. “Can you make it there, if I help?”

“Yeah,” he promises. “With help, I can make it.”

She smiles at him, warmly, almost coyly. “Can’t we all?” she asks.

Together, step by step, they make their way to the elevator and back down to the streets of Paris.

Adrien surrenders one of his crutches to Marinette and uses her as its replacement. Marinette is much more sturdy than she appears, but it’s obvious to the two of them as they step out of the old apartment building and onto the street that they can’t make back to school in such a state.

“I have my wallet,” Adrien says. “Taxi?”

Marinette’s shoulders slump with relief. Adrien ends up slumping with her by default. “Oh, thank goodness. Yes, please!”

\--

“This is totally your fault, you know.”

Chat Noir startles out of his thoughts, staring askance at Ladybug. “What?”

“You said you wanted things to get more exciting. You said you were getting bored.”

“No, _I_ said that we were developing a routine.”

“Stuck in a rut,” Ladybug counters.

“Guaranteed to win!” Chat retorts. “I didn’t necessarily say that was a bad thing.”

Ladybug’s expression belies the fact that she doesn’t believe him for a second.

Chat makes a face at her. “Honestly, my lady. Don’t be superstitious.”

That makes her laugh, even though he hadn’t meant to be funny in that moment. Ladybug sighs and tugs harder at her bounds. “This stinks,” she declares, vehemently. Chat isn’t sure if she means the situation or the stuff boiling under their feet. Either way, she’s right.

“It’s not our best look,” Chat Noir agrees. He gave up wiggling around against his own ropes ages ago. He frowns darkly at the boiling pit bubbling violently under their feet. “This is so cliche.”

Ladybug grumbles. She tries to lift her legs up and push at the thick ropes with her slippered feet, but it doesn’t do any good. 

Chat hisses softly as the beam holding them up off the ground rattles with the force of Ladybug’s struggling. “Not for nothing, but do you think you could stop that? You’re going to rattle us right into the sludge immediately, at this rate.”

Ladybug goes still. “Do something.” 

Chat chuckles fondly. He swings himself around so that he and Ladybug can hang face-to-face. “You’re the one with the complex machinations, Bugaboo. What do you want me to do?”

“A Cataclysm would be nice.”

Chat Noir reflexively curls his hands where they are bound tight under the yards and yards of thick rope. “I could Cataclysm the ropes around me,” he agrees. _And probably myself in the process. _He looks down at the sludge. If he can Cataclysm his bindings and move quickly enough, he might be able to free himself and avoid dropping down into the dangerous looking gunk below.

Ladybug bites her lip. She’s obviously aware of the danger, but they’re out of options, and the longer they hang around here, the more damage the akumatized villain might be doing out in Paris. She gives him a sharp nod. “Do it.”

Chat swallows thickly. He hopes his cat-like reflexes are up to snuff, today. “Cataclysm!” he shouts. He can feel the familiar tingle of the ability tingle in his hand. He bends his gloved hands to touch the ropes. They turn to ash at the touch. Chat Noir hangs for one eternity of a beat before gravity claims him--he feels like a Looney Toons character in that moment. Chat throws out his arms and latches himself securely around Ladybug’s dangling black-and-red legs. They swing dangerously for a moment before going still. Chat buries his face against Ladybug’s thighs, shuddering. “Well. That was close.”

“Yep,” Ladybug agrees. “Thanks, though. That was helpful. Now, do you think you can swing yourself over to the edge of the pit and get me down?”

Chat nods, still hiding his face. He definitely, definitely does not want to look down right now. 

“Kitty,” Ladybug says, softly. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t let you fall.”

Ladybug has absolutely no way of helping him if he should fall, not with her hands and yoyo all wrapped up with her like a buggy burrito. Even so, he takes heart at the sentiment behind the nonsensical promise.

“Okay,” Chat agrees faintly. “Let’s get to swinging.” 

\--

Chat lands hard on the balls of his feet right on the very edge of the deep pit of bubbling sludge. He windmills his arms for a second and manages to keep his balance, hopping forward a few steps for his own comfort. He pulls the staffs from his belt and clicks them out to the size of his crutches, swinging bodily on them to make quick time across the large, empty warehouse. He frowns at the buttons of the powerboard. “Uhhh, Ladybug?”

“There’s got to be something on there that says ‘down!’” Ladybug calls back, determinedly.

Chat wrinkles his nose. Most of the labels that may have once marked the buttons on the old powerboard have been worn away by time. He can’t make heads or tails of it. 

His ring beeps, the first dot of the pawprint on his ring going dark. No time for inaction. He closes his eyes, makes a wish, and pulls on the nearest lever.

With a grinding of gears, the pulley system engages, and Ladybug starts to lower right toward the gunk. “Uhm, Chat?”

Chat Noir curses softly and finds another lever, more like a joystick than an up-and-down switch. Guessing, he nudges the joystick to the side...and breathes a sigh of relief as the machine engages and spins the large beam so that Ladybug hangs over concrete instead of mystery goo. From there, he lowers her all the way to the ground. It takes him a bit of effort with the claws of his gloves to tear up the thick ropes, but he manages, especially with Ladybug providing assistance from inside. 

Once free, Ladybug stretches wide and starts swinging her yoyo as if she expects trouble at any minute. “C’mon, Chat! We’ve got a city to save!”

Chat’s ring beeps for the second time even as he catapults himself behind his swinging partner up into the rooftops to get a better view. “Okay, but we better make this quick!”

“Quick as I can,” Ladybug promises. She squints at the skyline and points suddenly at a tiny dot on the horizon. “There she is! Let’s go!”

Chat’s hips give a twinge as he snaps his staffs out to their full length and goes flying high into the air in pursuit of their villain. He trusts his lady, but even the Miraculous Ladybug isn’t able to control the steady flow of time.

\--

Ladybug is just purifying the akuma when the last, largest dot on Chat’s miraculous starts to beep and flash. “Lady--.”

“Go ahead!” she assures him, throwing up the Lucky Charm and casting the Miraculous Ladybug. The little buggies make their rapid pass over the city, putting everything to rights again.

Chat swings into the shadows of an alley. It’s the closest protection he can find, and he barely makes it there as it is. Plagg zips up to his shoulder and sits there. “You can’t keep doing this!” Plagg hisses at him, sounding every inch an actual cat, for once. 

“At least we’re not stranded on a roof this time,” Adrien replies, peaceably. He peers around the edge of the alley wall, smiling as he watches Ladybug swing away and out of sight. He sighs and rests against the dirty wall. “She’s incredible. The way she--.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ladybug is amazing. I’m hungry!”

Adrien gives him his emergency cheese--something they’ve been relying on rather a lot, lately--and settles his staffs-turned-crutches securely under his arms. “C’mon. Nathalie’s going to come call me to dinner any minute. We better call another taxi.”

Adrien is grateful that, despite everything else about their tumultuous relationship, at least his father doesn’t hesitate to provide his son with a significant weekly allowance. Adrien has taken so many taxis in the last year that some of the drivers are starting to know him by name--although, to be fair, that might have something to do with his limited modeling career. (And, God, Adrien hopes none of those friendly drivers gets it into their heads to mention his too-obvious crutches and braces to anyone important; maybe he should mock up some non-disclosure contracts of his own).

Adrien shimmies himself into the taxi, lying across the length of the empty back seat. He closes his eyes. Coming down from his time in the suit often leaves him exhausted even at the best of times. His pain is baseline, at least. It never gets “acceptable,” he can never get “used” to the constant, persistent ache and buzz of it, but there is a comfort of a kind in the variety of pain that is familiar and not elevated by excessive strain.

It’s a shock, to find his father waiting for him at the dining table.

“Sit down, Adrien.”

Adrien swings over to his chair and carefully situates himself on it, his eyes on his father the entire time. Adrien has often wished to share at least a few meals a week with his last remaining parent, but now he regrets that unspoken plea. Adrien tends to misremember the force of the foreboding aura around Gabriel Agreste when he is not present. Now he is reminded and finds the oppressive nature of it bordering on suffocating.

“It’s nice to see you, father,” Adrien hazards.

His father hums, noncommittal. Adrien cannot even begin to guess at his mood. Is Adrien in trouble? Has he slipped up, somewhere, with his many secrets? Has his father learned about his adventure on the rooftop last week--surely Marinette wouldn’t have tattled. But maybe they were seen?

Or maybe the trouble goes deeper than that. Between unplanned house parties and superheroic sneaking around, Adrien has so many sins that could easily bring the full weight of his father’s disappointment onto his shoulders.

Adrien startles when the staff comes in to set their plates on the table. He offers an apologetic smile at the chef and his assistant, who had startled reflexively when Adrien did. “It, uhm, looks really good,” he says, because it does--it always does--and he’s desperate to say something, anything, that might break the stony expression on his father’s face.

Adrien focuses on his salmon and potatoes and doesn’t meet his father’s eyes for the majority of their stilted, silent meal.

He’s just pushed his plate to the side, thinking perhaps he was mistaken and all is well, when his father slides a tablet towards him across the table. “I imagine you’ve yet to see the news.”

Adrien’s heart sinks, but he’s not a champion of Paris for nothing. He picks up the tablet and allows his gaze to scan across the screen. It’s not hard to determine what his father wants him to look at. It’s not quite first-page, but the spread of news is vast, and the incriminating photo takes up a whole page of the publication. 

He reads the headline twice. _Shocking Fashion Family Secret: A Handicapped Heir! _

It’s difficult to determine where Adrien was standing at the time the shot was taken, but he knows it isn’t outside the school nor outside the back entrance of the mansion. Therefore, the photographer must have caught him stranded in the city just post an akuma attack. This is Adrien, trying to flag down a taxi to make a speedy retreat home. No wonder his father is upset; Adrien has strict orders not to go out into the city without permission, and certainly never alone, and never without some manner of disguise. His braces and crutches are unmistakable. No one looking at the photo would be able to pass the visual off as evidence of a minor, temporary injury, either. The devices are too obviously an extension of Adrien’s own body, too well worn and used.

Adrien wonders, hollowly, what becomes of all of those stacks of non-disclosure agreements, now. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, softly, unable to tear his eyes away from the digital paper. He’d like to say more, do more to make for this terrible mistake, but there is nothing that would ever be enough.

“I’ve been fielding calls all afternoon,” his father says, measured, cold. “Three of our most promising contracts have fallen through, cancelled in light of this...disaster.”

Adrien does look up at that, surprised. “But--but they all already _knew_\--.”

“It’s not about what they know, Adrien. It’s about what the public knows. And now they all know, every one of them, that our brand’s most cherished upcoming model is a sham.”

Adrien flinches at that last, bitter word. “I--.”

“--I’ve already scheduled a press conference first thing tomorrow morning. It’s impossible to get ahead of this, now, and we can hardly try to deny it. Therefore, we’ll have to come clean--with our own spin, of course.”

“Of course,” Adrien echoes, faintly. He doesn’t like where this is going.

When he sees the copy that Nathalie brings in a moment later, his growing sense of dread is proven wise. He reads the brief speech multiple times and finds himself red-faced and fighting tears. 

“You won’t be able to react so emotionally tomorrow, you understand,” Gabriel says, disapproving. 

Adrien coughs lightly and rubs the back of his hand quickly across his eyes. “Sorry,” he says, barely able to speak through the tight, burning knot in his throat. “Uhm. D-does this mean I won’t be modeling, anymore?”

Gabriel sniffs. “That is up to the investors and the board, in the end. We won’t know until after the reactions to the press conference are analyzed.” A pause. “You will need to memorize the document. It must look genuine. Don’t change anything; our best PR writers spent a lot of time on getting the wording just right.”

Adrien wonders, rebelliously, why they didn’t use any of that precious work time on consulting with the person expected to read the speech in front of hundreds of thousands of hungry viewers in less than twelve hours. Adrien has some notes.

“I’ll...start working on it right now,” he says, instead. “Unless there’s anything else?”

Gabriel gives him a sharp, short nod. “That’s all. Nathalie will walk you through what you will wear and how you must stand before the filming starts tomorrow.”

“W-will...will you be there?” Adrien asks, terror gripping his heart at the thought that he might be abandoned to the wolves, in this, left to fend for himself without his father’s stone-faced aura of power to protect him.

Gabriel hesitates. “The board recommends that I, as the face of the company, remove myself from this debacle as much as possible until we can determine the state of the public mood.”

Adrien closes his eyes, just for a moment, just to get to grips with his new reality. Of course the board is correct. Adrien has always known that he is a corruption in the heart of the Agreste brand. Now, the whole rest of the world knows it, too. He has to accept the consequences. This is his fault. “Okay,” he agrees, softly. “Thank you, father. Goodnight.”

\--

Adrien blinks owlishly at his phone as he goes to plug it in for the evening. It’s full to bursting with unheard voicemails and even more waiting text messages.

He cries in earnest as he opens the text messages and reads them--lines upon lines of words from his school friends, providing sympathy and support. None of them--not even Chloe--truly understands the depth of his misstep, but they all recognize that Adrien’s disability being outed by the press means trouble for him on a personal and professional level. They’re sorry it happened, and they want him to know that he has friends, if he needs them, in this time of upheaval. 

One of the last messages in the list--which means it was one of the first sent--is from Marinette. Unlike most of his friends, she only sent one message instead of an entire, frantic chain of them. It’s a photo of large cupcake with a cute floral-printed wrapper and a tall tower of lavender-colored frosting. A tiny piece of sugared fruit sticks out of the top. _It’s passionfruit_, the caption says, _and you can pick it up whenever you want--on the house_.

Even as Adrien reads the note, a new message from Marinette--sent hours after the first--pings through. It’s another photo, this time of a plastic cupcake tower laden with at least two dozen similarly giant cupcakes with the same kind of decoration. _My dad says these are on us, too. So...bring an appetite? _Adrien doesn’t have the emotional fortitude to respond to any of the other dozens and dozens of messages from his friends, but he can’t help but smile at Marinette’s added-on comment. He sends her an emoji of a blond-headed person holding a knife and fork and a thumbs-up emoji after it. 

After some hesitation, he sends another message: _Thanks!_

He can see Marinette typing a response.

_If there’s more we can do beyond pastries, please let us know. _Adrien types and retypes his message three times before he can bring himself to send it, feeling like a burden, a misake, a problem that other people constantly have to solve: _I will_.

\--

Adrien is shocked when Marinette corners him the next morning, minutes after the press conference has ended and the Gorilla has started to abscond away with him toward their waiting getaway car. 

“It’s okay,” Adrien tells the bodyguard. “Uh, but you better get in the car with us if you want to talk, Marinette.” 

The mob of reporters behind them are borderline vicious. One had already bumped rudely into Adrien on his way down from the podium, nearly knocking him straight to the ground in the process. If the Gorilla hadn’t been there to steady him and snarl at the other man to back off, Adrien very well might have fallen down--and wouldn’t that have been the cherry on top of the sundae of Adrien’s humiliation, today.

Marinette not only scampers into the limo after him, she even helps Adrien get into the car, patiently supporting his legs as he shimmies into the back-most bench seat and sits across it lengthwise, his legs stretched out straight across the leather. Marinette darts into the seats on the opposite side, facing him. She’s red faced and panting softly. It’s likely she had to elbow her way through the mass of reporters, too, and is feeling equally overwhelmed.

“That was _awful_,” Marinette says, and Adrien isn’t so oblivious as to think she means the frantic race to and into the car. “Adrien, you didn’t--those things you said, do you--?”

Adrien swallows and looks away through the tinted windows, unable to meet his friend’s worried eyes. “My father’s public relations committee wrote it,” he says, dully. 

“Okay,” Marinette replies, relaxing noticeably at the news. She keeps frowning, though. “But, what you said--you don’t...Uhm, I mean….” She trails off. That familiar awkwardness is starting to present itself again, leaving her stammering and fidgety. He absolutely does not blame her. This conversation makes his stomach feel full of ants.

The wording of the speech had been precise, calculated, and superficially benign. Apologetic in a way that left room for interpretation as to whether or not any wrong doing had really been done at all. Adrien had delivered it perfectly, word for word, his inflection similarly inscrutable. But the message had been clear, despite that. He had heard it loud and clear, for sure, and Marinette obviously has, too.

Adrien just spent the better part of fifteen minutes apologizing fervently for his very existence, for sullying the Gabriel Agreste brand not just with the _lie_ but with the truth behind it, as well. It was a short, well-composed speech calculated to reveal Adrien for what he is: a terrible, shameful secret that any reasonable-minded father, especially a logical business man, would hide. He feels sick. But he hadn’t cried in front of the masses and their cameras, hadn’t so much as flinched in the face of those condemning words. He’d done his father proud in that way, at least.

Adrien will be shocked if any of the Agreste brand’s existing contracts last longer than another twenty-four hours. No one will decide to keep Adrien on as a model, now. He is, after all, a mistake. He never should have been let out into the world, let alone into the world of fashion, masquerading as someone whole and _normal _and--.

Marinette pulls a box out of her purse and hands it to him. “I was afraid you wouldn’t stop by,” she says. Adrien can hear the subtext. She was afraid he wouldn’t be _allowed_ to stop by the bakery, now, and she’s absolutely right. Adrien will be lucky to go anywhere for months, after this, except for maybe to school and back again--he hopes for that much, at least.

Adrien takes the small paper box and stares at the lovely logo on the top. He pops open the lid with his thumb and is not remotely surprised to see one of the passionfruit cupcakes sitting, only a tiny bit smished, inside. Despite everything, he smiles at it. “Will you split it with me?” he asks.

Marinette goes red-cheeked and stammering, again, but she nods. “Y-yeah! Okay! Thanks.”

Adrien breaks the cupcake in half with his fingers. It’s extremely silly and messy and the frosting will likely stain his fingers purple for days--but who cares? It’s not like he needs to remain perfect and approachable for the cameras, anymore. He picks up his half and hands Marinette hers still in the wrapper and box.

He offers her his half raised in a toast. A warm, confusing feeling battles the ants in his stomach for dominance and wins by a hair. “To good friends,” Adrien says.

Marinette raises her own bit in return. “To good friends,” she agrees, in a soft voice. 

They eat their cupcake halves in the limo and leave crumbs all over the seats. His father will be furious about it later, if he finds out. Adrien can’t bring himself to care. So he makes a mess and causes his father trouble. Isn’t that exactly what should be expected of a broken son?

\--

The Gorilla drops Marinette off at her door before taking himself and Adrien home.

Adrien keeps his eyes trained out the tinted windows, watching Paris with hungry eyes, well aware that--aside from his stints at Chat Noir--he’s unlikely to see much of the city in the days to come.

“Is my father here?” Adrien asks the moment he sees Nathalie waiting for him at the door. He feels strange, going in and out of the front entrance, but it’s not like it matters, now. And it’s a point of pride, swinging himself slowly step-by-step up the enormous stretch of stairs. (And wasn’t that a kick in the chest on top of everything, the realization that this house was built and established long after Adrien was born, that his parents both looked at the massive building and its infinite stairs and thought “ah, yes, that will be fine for all of us, no trouble at all”?)

“Not today, Adrien,” is all Nathalie says, and he hasn’t a clue if she means Gabriel is out, today, or if he simply refuses to so much as see his son in passing after everything Adrien has done.

Adrien takes the answer as a negative, either way, and quietly swings toward the elevator that will take him to his room. “I’m going to go finish my homework,” he tells Nathalie. Then, after a nervous pause. “I’m--am I going back to school on Monday?”

Nathalie nods in her usual neutral way. 

Adrien breathes a sigh of poorly hidden relief. “Thanks,” he says, and lets the automatic doors close between them.

Plagg immediately zips out of his hiding place and nestles deeply into Adrien’s hair. “What do you think your classmates will say tomorrow?”

Adrien shakes his head. He doesn’t really want to think about. He’s sure every one of his friends will be kind about it, but he’s not certain kindness is what he wants to hear. Certainly, he’s unwilling to suffer in the face of pity. And how could they not all pity him, after the press conference, especially? There’s no way they won’t all see it. It was internationally broadcast and probably available online mere minutes after the live stream had closed.

Adrien swings over to the couch and lies down on his stomach on it. “I’m not sure I even care about the modeling contracts,” he admits to Plagg, after a long silence passes between them--a silence in which Plagg snacks on several large pieces of cheese. “I’ve never liked it very much.”

It’s a terrible thing to admit, but Adrien doesn’t think his father will ever know of it. Besides, at this point, what does it matter? Adrien never liked how the photographers and their staff handled him, how they treated him like something fragile at best and subhuman at worst. He didn’t even like the supposed perks of the job--having his face all over Paris always felt like more layers of deception built on top of an already suffocating lie. Troubles that will never grace his door again. It’s over, a closed chapter.

The question of “what now?” is a concerning one, however. It seems his father is, at least for the time being, willing to allow him to continue attending school. Pulling modeling from his schedule of tasks, however, leaves a lot of free time. Adrien’s other hours aside from school are filled with lessons (piano, languages, chess), doctor’s appointments, and physical therapy sessions. It seems unlikely that he might be allowed to use those newly freed hours to hang out with his friends or otherwise develop a real social life. Adrien’s not unused to spending long hours in solitude, but the idea of spending even _more_ of his daily hours alone in his room, all but locked up in his house, makes him shudder with dread.

Except Chat Noir knows how to escape, doesn’t he? Adrien’s learned how to get away and cover his own tracks. He could never do so as _himself_\--his father knows that and doubtlessly relies on it as a means to keep Adrien..._manageable_\--but Chat Noir has the physical means to sneak out of an open window and scamper unseen down a wall. He could start patrolling more often. (And who’s going to complain if Chat Noir decides to, say, visit a zoo or go to a movie or stop at a cafe or...God, or _learn how to skate_ or _take fencing lessons _or _climb a mountain_ or any of the things that the Chat can do that Adrien Agreste can’t but has always dreamed--!)

Plagg cuts into his thoughts with a smothered burp. 

He has time _right now_ to himself, in fact, and no one in the house wants to see him.

“Plagg, are you fueled up enough for a trip?”

Plagg buzzes around to look at his face. “Oh, I don’t like where this is going. We’ve already talked about this, Adrien, you can’t use me just to--.”

“Please! Please, Plagg? I just want to go on patrol.”

The kwami makes a raspberry noise at him. “No you don’t. You want to play hooky.”

Adrien meets the kwami eye for eye. “And is that so bad, really? Remember when it was my birthday, and my friend had been akumatized, and I needed to do something about it, but you told me to enjoy the party, first?”

“And _you_ said you were being stupid. You said it was selfish and it wasn’t right.”

Adrien’s expression goes almost as stony as his father’s. “Maybe I should be more selfish. And who knows, really, what is and isn’t right?” 

Plagg bobs in the air, clearly torn.

“Two hours,” Adrien pleads.

Plagg hums.

“Just a few hours, and I’ll spend half of it patrolling and doing hero-y things.”

Plagg sighs, long-suffering. 

Adrien realizes his mistake. Plagg doesn’t actually care, that much, about right versus wrong or the sacredness of Adrien’s duty. He’s an entity of destruction and, to a smaller extent, chaos. Plagg only cares about--.

“--I’ll double your cheese rations.”

Plagg offers a tiny paw for shaking. “Deal.”

“Deal,” Adrien echoes, shaking the paw carefully. “Plagg? Claws out!”


	2. Chapter 2

Ever since the press conference, Adrien’s been different. Everyone knows it, and none of them know quite what to do. Nino’s tried to help by inviting Adrien out--to pizza with the gang, to play videogames at Nino’s place, all kinds of things. But Adrien only turns every invitation down with a regretful smile and a subdued “Sorry, Nino, but I can’t go out today.”

Adrien’s always struggled to accept his friends’ invitations. Between his work and his lessons and the weight of his father’s expectations, his time has rarely ever been his own. But now things should be different, shouldn’t they, with his work schedule off the table, at least?

Marinette watches Adrien turn down Nino yet again. Neither boy seems remotely happy about it. She wishes there was something she could do. Just like Ladybug can’t help Chat Noir, Marinette can’t help Adrien Agreste. And all either the superheroine or the supernormal girl ever wants is to help those she cares about when they’re in need. It’s not fair.

“Hey, girlfriend. What’s with the sad eyes?” Alya asks. She prods Marinette in the shoulder and follows her gaze. “Ah, it’s Adrien. Duh, Alya. Why don’t you go over there and _talk_ to him, Marinette?”

“What would I say?” Marinette asks. She never knows what to say to Adrien, always stumbling over her words around him, always practicing and practicing only to mess it up. But, in this case, she’s not worried about making a fool of herself. She’s worried that there isn’t anything she or _anyone_ can say or do to make things better for their friend. Adrien’s whole world fell apart. How can anyone fix that?

Of course, the hungry hordes of the paparazzi those first few days after the conference had hardly helped things. Marinette peeks out a nearby window and breathes a sigh of relief. There’s only a handful of them out there, now. Enough for the Gorilla to dispatch with ease when he picks Adrien up later in the day. Even so, the local channels and the international web have been full to brimming with “news” about Adrien and the Gabriel Agreste fashion empire. Some of the speculation has been truly underhanded if not downright unhinged. Marinette hopes Adrien is practiced enough at the nature of fame to keep himself away from as much of it as he can. 

Judging by the stiffness of his shoulders and the way he struggles to meet anyone’s eyes, though, she doubts it.

“Say you’re worried about him. Say he should come back to the bakery with you some lunchtime for a cookie. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Just talk to him.”

Marinette watches as Chloe approaches, shoos Nino to the side, and gets up in Adrien’s face. Despite the fact that Chloe appears to be yelling and her expression is fierce, Adrien relaxes marginally in her presence and even manages a smile. Sometimes they forget it, but Chloe was, for a long time, Adrien’s closest friend. She seems more able than any of them to shake him out of doldrums, even if only for a minute. 

“I’m going to talk to Chloe,” Marinette says.

“What?” Alya demands in return. “Uh, did you just misspeak or--? Marinette!”

Marinette follows Chloe as she breaks away from Adrien and heads toward the classroom up the stairs. “Uhm, Chloe?”

“Ugh,” Chloe replies in a low, theatrical groan. “_What_, Dupain-Cheng?”

“C-could you? Uhm. It’s about Adrien.”

“Oh, please. Not this again. Listen, you lowly--.”

“I just think someone needs to watch out for him,” Marinette interrupts, speaking quickly and without breath to avoid being interrupted herself. “And you’re the one he knows best and I know you’re stubborn enough to get through to him, so I’d really appreciate it if maybe you could convince him to come and have lunch with a bunch of the rest of us today, okay?”

Chloe gapes at her before composing herself with a snap of her jaw and an off-handed shrug. “Fine,” she says, crisply. “I’ll ask him. But you better pick somewhere good. I’m not eating anything _cheap_.”

Marinette, rather foolishly, hadn’t expected Chloe would also be coming along. But she nods, now, realizing her error. “Of course. We’ll all go wherever _Adrien_ wants to go.”

Chloe growls at that but doesn’t respond. She stomps her way to her desk. When Adrien arrives via the elevator a few minutes later, she all but pounces on him. Within minutes, she’s achieved what no one else has in weeks: Adrien agrees to hang out with his friends over their lunch break with a short nod and a small smile.

Marinette hums with satisfaction to herself. Alya squints at her, suspicious. “What--?”

“Everything’s fine,” Marinette assures her. “We’re going to have lunch with Adrien and Nino and Rose and Juleka and Ivan and Chloe and--.”

“_What_? Marinette!” Alya hisses, but her oncoming tirade comes to a close as Ms. Bustier steps in the front of the room and starts her morning lecture. “This better be worth it.”

Marinette watches the back of Adrien’s head with a dreamy eye. “It is.” \--

Marinette frowns from her place at her balcony. A black streak has just hurtled itself across the horizon. It’s the sixth time that she’s caught Chat Noir roaming across Paris this week alone. And the week before that she saw him at least twice outside of the usual akuma attack, just...leaping by. It’s rare that either of them take it upon themselves to monitor Paris outside of an attack. And even when they do patrol, they do so as a duo. But Chat Noir hasn’t extended any sort of invitation to Ladybug in a professional capacity. And just the other day, Alya’s Ladyblog reported seeing Chat Noir coming out of a movie theater with a half empty box of popcorn and a grin on his face. Marinette doubts there was much evil-defeating to be done at the megaplex. So what is the silly kitty up to?

“Tikki,” Marinette calls. The kwami buzzes out from Marinette’s room, a curious look on her face. She follows Marinette’s gaze and must catch sight of Chat, too, because the kwami sighs in a familiarly longsuffering manner.

“What is he doing?” she asks.

“I don’t know. But I think we should find out, don’t you?”

Tikki nods, the picture of determination.

“Tikki? Spots on!”

Ladybug swings up and away from her parents’ bakery and heads straight for her errant partner in anti-crime. “Chat Noir!” she calls.

Chat slides to a stop. He’d been just about to make another flying leap off a rooftop. As far as she can tell, he’s playing some kind of self-prescribed game, hurtling himself off of the edge of each building to land with perfect feline precision on the next. She’s seen him perform a similar maneuver many times while on the job, but there’s usually less gleeful whooping, then. 

“Ladybug!” he calls back, waving a hand. “I was just about to go to the park. Do you want to come?”

“The park?” she asks, dropping down next to him. “Why? Was there an akuma sighting?”

Chat Noir laughs. “You know, all work and no play makes a lady pretty buggy.”

Ladybug doesn’t share in his mirth. “Chat, what--?”

Chat Noir cuts her off. “There’s a band playing at the park today, you know. We could dance!”

“Dance?” Ladybug echoes. She’s not exactly unaware that Chat Noir likes to flirt, but this is an entirely new and odd way for him to go about it.

“Dance!” Chat agrees, fervently. He seems almost manic. “You’d have to teach me, though. I’ve never danced before.”

“Never?” Ladybug asks, surprised. She doesn’t have a good grasp of who Chat Noir is out of the mask, but she’s never met anybody before that hasn’t had least swayed side to side with a loved one at a cousin’s wedding or something.

“_Never_,” Chat Noir says, brightly. “Well. A friend of mine stood around with me at a dance, once. And people have danced _around_ me. But I’ve never danced. Can you teach me?”

Ladybug isn’t sure what’s gotten into her partner--he doesn’t seem akumatized or the victim of someone else’s akuma powers, at least--but she also isn’t about to turn him away when he seems to be struggling with something. And he is struggling, for all that he’s as full of laughter and jokes as ever. She knows him well enough to recognize pain when she sees it, no matter how buried it might be.

“Sure, _chaton_,” she agrees, willing to play along and see where this leads. “I could dance.”

\--

The band plays mostly jazz numbers, and Ladybug is delighted to see Chat Noir so enthralled with the concept of swing dancing. She teaches him the few simple steps she knows--Marinette is clumsy, and dancing isn’t one of her hobbies--and then backs away, laughing, as several of the more seasoned dancers already spinning about the park take him in hand. By the time the band winds down and the folks start to disperse, Chat Noir and one of the more patient of his teachers are twirling each other around with ease. Chat Noir may not have previously known how to dance, but he has a strong sense of rhythm. He’s an easy student, too, not afraid to take mistakes as a learning opportunity.

“Well,” Ladybug says as they walk away from the park, “That was fun!”

He grins over at her. “It was, though I’d hoped for a chance to dance with _you_ more, my lady.”

She rolls her eyes but doesn’t have the heart to shut him down over something so innocent. “Maybe next time.”

“Next time?” Chat Noir asks, as if hardly daring to hope. 

She shrugs. “I don’t see why not, if you’re going to be wandering all over Paris on our off hours anyway….” She looks at him to see how he reacts to such a leading question.

Chat Noir doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he comes to stand still, grabbing at her arm to pull her back. He points across the way with a grin on his face. “Look!” 

She looks but doesn’t see anything. “What is it?”

Chat shakes his head, obviously despairing of her. “The tower, of course! Let’s climb it.”

Should she reassess her assumption that Chat is not, in fact, somehow akumatized or otherwise brainwashed? She tugs out of his light grasp and turns to face him, studying his lensed eyes. “You want to climb the Eiffel? _Chaton_, we bounce all around that thing all the time! I could yoyo us right up to the top, if you wanted.”

“But I’ve never _climbed_ it,” Chat presses.

Marinette finds that a bit odd. Sure, the tower is mostly a tourist attraction, but the majority of the Parisians she knows have still climbed to the top; it’s a right of passage for most kids her age, in fact. When you’re old enough to be out in the city unsupervised with your friends, you go to the tower and climb up it and see the whole of the city before you, all yours for the taking. Well. At least. That’s what Marinette and _her_ friends had done.

But Chat seems in earnest and, honestly, she’s worried what might happen if she leaves him to his own devices, right now. She breathes a little huff of a sigh, glad she’s in the miraculous suit and therefore less likely to embarrass herself by falling down the stairs. “Okay,” she says. “But afterward you’re buying me an ice cream.”

He grins. “Deal!” Abruptly, he dashes away from her across the grass. “Last one there, Bugaboo, is in the paté!” 

Ladybug hesitates, watching Chat Noir run off. She’s not sure she’s ever seen him go so long without using his staffs, before. He kept them firmly in his belt while dancing, of course, and now he runs beyond her reach without using them despite the advantage they would give. She frowns to herself, observing his gait. He always moves smoothly when leaping forward and catapulting high up with the staffs. Without them, his steps are unsteady. He leans too far forward when he runs, looking liable to topple head over heels any minute. 

Something small flickers in the very back of her head, but she lets it drift away from her. If she doesn’t get moving, she’s going to lose this race!

“Hey!” she shouts after him, starting to run. “Don’t leave me behind! Someone has to buy the tickets!”

\--

They sit together on a high rooftop, shoulder to shoulder, and eat their ice creams while the sun drifts lazily down out of sight. 

Ladybug’s earrings give their first beep. Without using their abilities, their miraculous powers last much longer, draining their kwamis far less.

“This was a good day, right?” Chat asks. His ring beeps, too, his second of the night. He’s been in his suit much longer than she.

She gives into impulse and gently taps his nose with a fingertip. “Of course. We always have good days together, Chat. Even when we’re fighting crime.”

He grins at her, wide and warm, and she grins back. She pops the last bit of sugar cone into her mouth and starts to get to her feet. Chat stops her with a gentle hand. 

“Come out with me again tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I can’t. I have sc--er. I have obligations.”

“All day?”

She pauses at that. “_Most_ of the day,” she hazards. Her evening could be free, if she did her homework quickly.

“I have obligations, too,” he says, “but I’ll be, er, I’ll be free--at five o’ clock. Come out with me. We could go to the zoo! Or the catacombs! Or--”

“The catacombs?” Ladybug echoes, blinking at him. Chat Noir doesn’t seem the type to be very interested in tunnels full to brimming with the remnants of the dead. Marinette herself has certainly never been--it’s spooky!

“They’re underground,” he says, as if that explains anything whatsoever. “If you don’t like that, how about a segway rental? Or there are parts of the Louvre I’ve never seen. Or--.”

She interrupts him again, as gently as she can. “I like spending time with you. You’re a good friend to me, Chat Noir. But I don’t think I can be Ladybug all the time, especially when I don’t have a good reason to do so. It’s--it’s not what I promised to do. I have a duty to myself and to the city. And when I’m not fulfilling that duty...in the daytime, I have a normal life.”

“So patrol with me, instead!” Chat presses. “You can do that, right? Tomorrow night, come and protect Paris with me. That’s fun _and_ practical.”

Ladybug’s earrings beep. She needs to go soon. She tugs Chat Noir’s wrists into her hands, ignoring the fact that he’s still holding onto half of a nibbled sugar cone. “What’s going on?” she asks, bluntly. “Is something wrong? Can I help?”

Chat pulls back from her even as his ring beeps. “We should go,” he says, pushing her question--and her concern--aside. Ladybug rubs her gloves nervously against her thighs, feeling stung.

She watches him extend his staffs and prepare to leap down from the roof to the ground below. “Chat Noir,” she says, and he goes still, though he doesn’t turn to face her. “...Whenever you’re ready to talk to me, I’m ready to listen. You know that, right?”

He nods. “I know,” he agrees, and disappears from her sight as he leaps away.

Ladybug swings her way home and rolls in through her window just as her time runs out. She immediately hands Tikki a macaron from the box on her desk. Marinette heaves a heavy sigh, throwing herself down into her chair. “I don’t know what to do, Tikki,” she admits, unhappily. “Something is going on with Chat Noir, but Ladybug can’t help him--not if he won’t let me.”

Tikki nibbles on her cookie in silence until it is gone. As she brushes crumbs off her paws she looks to Marinette, a carefully neutral expression on her face. “Maybe Ladybug can’t,” she agrees, slowly. “But I bet Marinette can.” “What does _that_ mean?” Marinette asks, startled. But Tikki yawns widely and zips over to her bed. Marinette is almost positive the little kwami is feigning sleep, but she can’t bring herself to test that theory. Instead, she goes to put on her pajamas and prepares for bed, thoughts tangled up in Chat Noir and Adrien Agreste, two friends who seem to be in more trouble than they can handle alone.

\--

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Marinette complains, mostly to herself, but she’s confident Tikki is listening, even if she is hiding deep inside of Marinette’s purse at the moment. 

Marinette knows with certainty that Chat Noir is nearby. He and Ladybug fought an akuma in this exact location just yesterday, and Ladybug had asked him specifically to come back the following night. Marinette also knows the superhero probably thought Ladybug intended to hang out with him, despite her earlier brush off. She’s sorry for the deception, sure, but sometimes the ends justify the means. 

And, right now, Marinette means to get Chat Noir’s head on straight in the way that only a casual acquaintance can. She has words to say, and she can’t communicate them to Chat Noir from behind the mask.

Marinette sees a familiar figure dash across the sky. Mere moments later, Chat Noir drops gracefully onto the grass in front of her, looking more than a tad confused. “Hi, Marinette,” he says. “Have you seen Ladybug, by any chance? I can’t find her anywhere and, believe me, she’s usually impossible to miss.”

Marinette makes a show of looking around. It’s dusk, and there aren’t many people in the park at this hour on a weeknight. “No, Chat Noir. Sorry, I haven’t.”

Chat’s shoulders drop. “Right, okay. Well, thanks, Princess.”

Marinette, to her credit, doesn’t make a face at the term of unearned endearment. She does, however, grab at Chat’s tail before he can scamper off. “I know I’m a poor substitute for Ladybug,” she says, somehow without any irony, “But...you’re welcome to stay and hang out with me. I’m on my way to the bakery.”

Chat’s ears twitch nervously. “Uh, well, is your fath--I mean, your dad--?”

Marinette laughs. “Don’t worry. I swear, that was just a one-off stress reaction or something. He really does like you. Er, as a friend of mine, I mean. I promise.”

Chat nods, apparently appeased by this. “I’d love to see your bakery again, Marinette.” A pause. “And eat something delicious while I’m there.”

She takes his hand in her own without hesitation, just as she would Alya’s, and tugs him forward. “Great! Let’s go quickly, though.”

“What’s the rush? You’re not afraid of the dark, are you? Because you don’t need to worry. You know I’d protect a beautiful maiden with my life!” He strikes a knightly pose. 

Marinette _does_ make a face at that, though he can’t see it. “I’m afraid that by the time we get there, all the pastries will be stale,” she corrects him, primly. “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea about the quality of my parents’ work.”

“Never,” Chat assures her. He allows himself to be yanked along behind her, though he stumbles more than once, oddly clumsy. She remembers that it’s rare to see him walking without his staffs, that the few times she’s witnessed it she found his posture unusual and his gait affected. Maybe he’s not comfortable without them. She slows down at the thought and lets go of his hand, though she keeps moving forward down the cobblestones.

Almost immediately, she hears the familiar ting of Chat Noir’s staffs extending and then the soft taps of the ends against the stones as he places them and swings forward far enough to move beside instead of behind her. He offers her a grin, and she smiles back and doesn’t comment on it. He looks more at ease, and that’s what matters. It’s easier to deliver hard truths when the listener is receptive. (She’s not potentially destroying a burgeoning friendship, is she? She hopes not. As annoying as Chat can be, she respects and cares for him, and even if he doesn’t know she’s Ladybug, it would still sting if Marinette were to become his enemy).

“Are you okay?” Chat asks, after they’ve walked together in silence for a bit too long. “I know I’m not exactly your favorite person--.”

“--That’s not true,” Marinette blurts out, surprising them both. “It’s not. I don’t know you well enough to judge you like that! I just, uhm. I think your posturing and all the sexiness is...unnecessary, that’s all.”

“Sexiness?” Chat presses, waggling his brows. Then he seems to catch himself. He winces, lifting his shoulders apologetically in lieu of lifting his hands. “Sorry. I think I see what you mean. I’ll tone it down, if it makes you uncomfortable. Most people seem to find my Casanova act funny, so I play it up.”

She wonders if ‘most people’ is Ladybug. _Does _Ladybug find it funny? Sometimes. Most of the time, actually. Chat’s flirting is often ill-timed, but it’s not rude or aggressive. He seems to legitimately like Ladybug, and she knows he’s trustworthy and genuine in all the ways that matter. So, sure. She finds his bad puns and even worse pickup lines a tiny bit humorous. Why not?

“Thank you,” Marinette says, and she means it. It’s customarily kind of the superhero to take other people’s concerns to heart, but she hadn’t quite expected it of him toward a near-stranger. Even if she _was_ a personal friend of Ladybug, as he believes, there’d be no reason for him to go out of his way to appease her. But he’s not appeasing her, is he? He’s being a friend.

Marinette comes to such an abrupt stop that Chat, trying to brake himself, nearly over balances and falls on his nose. 

“Uh? Did we miss a turn or something?”

Marinette sighs and turns to face him. They’re only a block from the bakery. It would be simple to dismiss this hiccup and keep walking toward her own territory, the place on which she intends to instigate a fearsome battle against Chat Noir’s self-destruction. But...that’s not the kind of thing one friend does to another, is it?

“I’ve been lying,” she says.

Chat’s expression is hard to read in the dim light and behind the lensed mask. He opens his mouth to speak.

She interrupts whatever he was about to say. “I made you think I wanted to hang out, tonight. But I have an ulterior motive.”

Chat backs away from her a step, but he nods. “I’m listening.”

“I was going to take you to the bakery because I’m comfortable, there. Because I know I can ply you with sweets and my parents and just...all of it. I needed to be in a place of power, and I needed you to be, be...vulnerable.”

“Well that’s ominous,” Chat Noir says, with brittle cheer. He sighs. “Is this--I don’t even know, Marinette. What are you trying to do? Are you going to throw your friend Alya at me? Because you know Ladybug and I would both be perfectly willing to give her an interview if you just asked.”

“It’s not that,” Marinette says, the pace of her words getting faster and faster as she speaks. “It’s about how reckless you’re being, lately. Practically everyone in Paris has noticed. For a month now, you’ve been appearing all around the city, just-just _hanging around_ in your suit, going to tourist traps and popping up in restaurants and everything. Anyone who’s managed to corner you long enough for a conversation says that you seem all right--excited to be wherever you are at the time, mostly. And that’s okay, I guess, except that some people aren’t as easily fooled, and some people think you ought to take your responsibilities to the wellbeing of Paris more seriously, and some people--.”

“--Want to drag me to the safety of their own home to give me a thorough dressing down,” Cat interrupts, dryly.

Marinette cringes, but she doesn’t back down. “I’m--_a lot_ of people--are worried about you, Chat Noir. With all the time you’re spending in the suit, I just have to wonder: What’s happened to your real life, that you’re playing cat at all hours, doing whatever you please? Isn’t someone out there looking for you, concerned for you? Not _you_, Chat Noir. The other you. The you that’s just a person with a life, I mean.”

Chat Noir lifts his lips in a snarl. It’s not an expression she’s seen on his face much, especially outside of a battle. “That’s--that’s none of your business, Marinette.”

“Yes, it is!” she snaps back at him. She jerks back immediately, covering her mouth. “I-I mean. Maybe it’s not. But it’s someone’s! And they’re obviously not--they don’t--so I am, instead! So there!”

Chat Noir stares at her for a long, quiet beat. She’s completely in the dark as to how he might react, now. He seemed confused, at first, and then irritated. But now he’s just blank-faced and glassy-eyed and...empty.

He swallows, and the spell breaks, and his expression is only hard to read because he will no longer look her in the eye. He gazes to the side and down at the stones. “That guy. The one with the normal life. He doesn’t _matter_, Marinette. That’s why no one’s wondering where he is or what he’s doing. They don’t care. And they don’t have to care. I’m not upset about it. I don’t--I don’t really care about him, either, honestly.” 

Marinette squeezes her eyes shut, hiding away from the pain those words cause. She had suspected, maybe, that Chat Noir’s unmasked life had taken a difficult turn. That, perhaps, the implications he’d made before about his distant family had come to a head. It hurts her to think that Chat Noir--or anyone--could feel so unrecognized and unloved in his own life. Moreover, it’s like a barb to the heart to hear him express that same level of dismissiveness toward _himself_. Chat Noir is silly and irreverent, but he’s also brave and compassionate and intelligent and kind. He can’t possibly be anything less without the mask. How could the people in his life, let alone he himself, fail to acknowledge his virtues?

When she opens her eyes again, Chat is gone. For a moment she panics, spinning on her heel, opening her mouth to call for him, her eyes raking desperately over the nighttime city, intent on tracking him down.

“But _you _care about him, don’t you?” Chat’s voice asks. She turns around again, but all she can see are strangers and shadows. The voice comes from a nearby alley, though. She follows his voice. She can see the shape of him against the darkness, the closer she gets. He’s leaning against the wall, his staffs held strangely against the backs of his elbows, his silhouette unfamiliar yet familiar in a way she can’t place and--. Adrien looks up just so and the farflung glow of a streetlamp catches his face, his wide green eyes and wet cheeks and his mouth twisted with bitterness. “_You_ care about Adrien Agreste.”

“And Chat Noir. I care about him, too,” Marinette replies, her voice thin with breathlessness. Her heart pounds rabbit quick in her chest. Her vision goes hazy with tears. She feels the weight of a thousand tiny memories and moments falling like a ton of bricks on her head and she’s so _stupid, so stupid, so st--_.

One of Adrien’s crutches clatters to the grimy ground as he intercepts her and hugs her tightly to him. “You’re _not_ stupid, Marinette!” he tells her, vehemently. “You’re not. Please stop saying that.”

Had she said that out loud? Oh. She’s so overwhelmed she can’t even appreciate the moment unfolding between them. She’s being hugged by Adrien Agreste! But also, Adrien is Chat Noir? So she’s hugging Chat, which is much less shocking. But her longtime crush is also her longtime partner against crime? But--but--.

_Also, Chat Noir loves Ladybug. And Ladybug is me._

Oh. Okay.

Adrien’s weight shifts and he smothers a tiny, keening kind of noise in his throat. 

“Oh, God! I’m sorry!” Marinette practically shouts right in his ear. She pushes her hand against his chest and shoulder, allowing him to lean on her instead of his open side. “Uhm, shoot, how can I--?” She helps Adrien brace himself against the wall on one side and quickly dips forward, snatching the fallen crutch and slipping it over his arm and into his hand. “Sorry!”

Adrien’s shattered expression lightens with that familiar, self-conscious smile she knows and loves so well, the same humble face he wore for his very first front page ‘shoot. “It’s okay, Marinette,” he says, and she believes him. Trusts him. With her life, apparently, in addition to so many other less important things she’s always trusted Adrien with. 

“You’re Chat Noir,” she says, carefully untangling herself from him and stepping back. Her cheeks burn with a blush, and she curses herself. She wouldn’t ever behave like this, awkward and nervous, around Chat Noir! And Adrien is Chat! Right there, Chat Noir, in the flesh if not the costume! Oh _God_.

“Uh-heh, yeah,” Adrien agrees. He swallows thickly. “You’re not--I mean, you know you can’t tell anybody, right?”

She wants to laugh at such a ridiculous statement, but she can’t. Her amusement is misplaced. Adrien is Chat Noir, but Marinette isn’t Ladybug. Not as far as Adrien--or anyone--knows. And she has to keep it that way, doesn’t she? To protect herself and those who love her? 

“You just told me--You shouldn’t have told me! Not me or anyone! Have you told anyone else?”

Adrien shoots her a look that is all Chat Noir. “I’m not completely out of my mind. So, no. I haven’t.”

“But you just told _me_!”

“I trust you.”

“W-well!” Marinette stumbles. “B-but I’m just--I mean, we’re just--.”

“Are you going to tell anyone?” he presses. 

“No! I’d never, ever, ever do that! But--are you crazy? Adrien, if anyone finds out--!”

“I know. I know! I’m a public figure. I understand the importance of secrets. Remember?”

Marinette hugs herself tightly. Adrien does understand the weight of keeping big secrets. He has also recently learned the world-shattering impact of when said secrets are brought kicking and screaming to light. “This isn’t like that. It’d be worse than that.”

“Worse than that,” Adrien echoes. His chuckle is subdued. “Gosh, that’s hard to imagine.”

“But it would be worse.”

“It would,” he agrees. It would take mere _seconds_ for Hawkmoth to locate Adrien once the news reached him. And if Adrien couldn’t call up his kwami in time? If Adrien was at school, in the midst of his friends? Adrien would lose his miraculous with hardly a blink, if Hawkmoth ever knew the truth. Marinette knows he understands the seriousness of the situation. So why…?

“You really trust me that much?” she says, awed. She’d never have expected that. Ladybug, perhaps, if Ladybug were not so insistent that their identities be secret. She could understand Cha--Adrien--trusting _Ladybug _that much. But Marinette? 

“You’re the most loyal person I know.” A pause. “Well, the second most, probably.”

Marinette’s starting to get a stress headache, right between the eyes. The truth rattles behind her teeth, buzzing like Tikki on a sugar high. “Right.”

“To be honest,” Adrien says, speaking slowly, “This decision is a selfish one. You’re right, about--what you said. And I think, it just feels like--.”

Marinette takes pity on Adrien and puts a hand on his arm. That sort of thing is getting easier with every passing moment as she sees more and more of Chat Noir in his gestures, his cadence, the light of his eyes. It’s all well and good to suffer those heart-melting, knee-buckling feelings of adoration for Adrien, but now...now isn’t the time to lose herself in those emotions and neglect _his_ feelings as a result. 

“You wanted someone in your corner. Your corner and Chat’s, together. Someone who knows your secret and can support both sides.” She can sympathize. She has spent hours and hours of her life longing for such a connection with someone, anyone. The number of times she’s been tempted to reveal her secret to her mother, to Alya, to a total stranger off the street--yes. She understands. If anything, she’s envious. And a little angry. Adrien has, unknowingly, laid a serious burden on her already overwhelmed shoulders with this one grand reveal.

Marinette forces a smile. “I’m here for you, Adri-Chat.”

He laughs. “Uh, thanks, I hate that.”

“Hm. Ch-Adrien?”

“How about just Adrien or Chat Noir, depending on the costuming?” He grips the handholds of his crutches more firmly and smiles at her so brightly that her own forced grin softens, too. “Can we still go to the bakery?” he asks, eagerly.

She rolls her eyes at him as she would if he were Chat Noir and not the love of her life. Except he’s both, now. Okay. “Sure. But you better not hog all the fruit tarts. I know how you are.” She knows how Chat is, anyway. Adrien’s probably never hogged anything in his life. A pang of understanding thrums tightly over her heartstrings. No wonder Chat is so loud, so boisterous, so grand. Adrien is always smothered, reserved, and self-conscious, even though he’s the smartest, sweetest, bravest--.

Okay. Well.

Marinette moves aside and gestures for Adrien to lead the way out of the cramped alley. Once they are back on the proper street again, she takes the lead but is careful not to outpace him or be outpaced as he swings besides her.

“This is weird for you, isn’t it?” Adrien asks, worriedly, after they’ve walked in silence right up to the bakery’s door. 

Marinette offers him a smile--small, but genuine, this time. “A little. It’s okay, though. I can get used to it.” 

He looks at her with a face that is entirely, completely Chat Noir. “Well, if you can get used to it,” he drawls, gently sarcastic.

She tweaks his nose. She’s done it before a thousand times as Ladybug, so it feels natural. “Yes, I can,” she retorts as she opens the bakery door for him. “That’s what friends do, don’t you know?”

Adrien grins at her. “I’m still learning,” he admits, as he swings from the darkness of the street to the radiant, warm light of her family’s bakery. “But that sounds about right.”

\--

Ladybug takes a precious few seconds to retrieve Chat Noir’s fallen staff from where it’s been kicked. She hurtles it with perfect precision across the expanse of the street and cheers softly as he leaps forward on his remaining staff and snags it neatly out of the air. 

“Thanks, my lady!” he calls to her. It’s very loud, currently, due to the nature of the akumatized villain they are fighting. His power is that of the air, and he’s working up quite a bluster along the streets of the city. 

“Must be a _Winds_day,” Chat chortles as he bounds by.

Ladybug makes a face at his back. “You stole that pun from _Winnie the Pooh_,” she accuses.

“Never heard of it,” Chat yells back, as innocently as one can when one’s face looks like that of a poodle sticking its head out of a moving car window. 

Ladybug snorts at the mental image and grabs her partner up in her grasp, pulling them both out of the way of a passing patio-sized umbrella spinning wildly about in the wind. Chat whistles as the umbrella sails by. 

“Time to cut this short, I think. All this wind is messing up my hair. Lucky Charm?” Chat shouts in Ladybug’s ear. 

“What was that you said before about routine?” Ladybug teases him, but in truth she quite agrees with his tactics. She pulls herself and Chat into the shelter of an alley and quickly casts the charm. When the object lands in her arms, she frowns. “Uhm, ok. I don’t even know what this is.”

Chat Noir makes a small noise the tone of which Ladybug cannot identify. “That’s a traction splint.”

“A what?”

Chat pulls the Lucky Charm from her hand and turns it upright. He holds it near his leg. “See? You wrap the leg in the straps to stabilize it and then the bottom part pulls taut and attaches to something sturdy to pull the leg tight--it’s used for broken bones, mostly. The traction keeps the break lined up and the blood flow normal, and the straps hold it still.”

Ladybug blinks at him.

Chat coughs softly and looks away as he mumbles something indistinct about spending time in hospitals.

Ladybug pushes that aside. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Beats me, Buggaboo, but it’d be great if you figured it out quick!”

Chat laughs softly at the brief sight of the akumatized villain hung upside down from a storefront horizontal flag pole, strung up by one leg. The villain twists his arms fervently to make his wind blow, but to no avail--he can’t catch his breath when dangling over the street. 

Ladybug yoyos the man’s belt buckle off and watches as it shatters onto the concrete. She purifies the akuma with ease and then casts her Miraculous Ladybug charm to clear all the mess away. Chat Noir catches their former antagonist in his arms with a laugh and a gleeful “hi there!”

It’s a good day. Almost fun, in its own way, as much as the breakneck defense of the city of Paris can be.

Ladybug swings off and returns moments later on foot as Marinette. She taps Chat Noir on the shoulder, interrupting his signing autographs for a small gaggle of teenaged looky-loos. “_Bonjour_,” she greets, playfully. 

“Hello, Marinette!” Chat replies. He waggles a sharpie toward her threateningly. “Want me to sign anything?”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Maybe next time.” She points at his ring just as it beeps. “Looks like you’ve got somewhere else to be, right now.”

He grins at her, obviously reveling in their newly shared secret. “That’s true. Sorry, everyone, I better get going. See you around!” 

Marinette watches Chat Noir fling himself high into the air and out of sight. A few hours later, she approaches Adrien’s desk. She can feel the eyes of their classmates, especially Alya and Nico, following her progression in surprise.

“Listen, Adrien,” she says, without a hint of stammer. “Would you like to go out with me, sometime?”

Adrien stares up at her, eyes wide and jaw lose with shock. “Oh, uh. Marinette, I--.”

“I know you’re interested in someone else,” she says, levelly. She can’t stop now that she’s started, she has to see this through. In her head, she pictures Adrien’s face half-hidden in his familiar, comforting black mask. “But I really like you, and I’d like to spend some time together just you and me. And if that’s just as friends then I understand. But I needed to ask.”

Alya may or may not be filming this on her phone right now. Marinette doesn’t dare to look.

Adrien swallows heavily and then, slowly, nods. “I’d like that very much. Where do you want to go?”

“Girl!” Alya shouts in glee, the word smothered by Nico lunging over the desk and tackling her to the ground with a muffled “be cool, dude!”

Marinette blushes. She can’t believe what she’s just heard. “You...really?”

Adrien nods. “Really. But, uhm, you should know, it’s kind of hard for me to--.”

“It’s okay. I know your dad doesn’t--I understand. In your own time, okay?”

Adrien laughs softly. “Uh, yeah, that’s also a factor, but what I was going to say is that it’s hard for me to get around in some places in Paris. You know?” He taps one of his crutches on the floor meaningfully.

“Right!” Marinette replies, bopping herself lightly on the forehead with a palm. “Well, that’s okay. We can figure that out.”

“Yeah,” Adrien agrees, thoughtfully. “We can figure it out.”


	3. Chapter 3

Despite everything, the next few months are some of the happiest of Adrien’s life. 

He keeps himself out of his father’s line of sight, most days. He goes to school and does his best work. He dons his miraculous most evenings for patrol and for every catastrophe (pun only marginally intended) and does even better work. And, in between, he and Marinette explore a new dimension to their friendship.

Marinette isn’t what he’d thought. At least, she’s not _only_ that. He’s always known her to be kind and talented. She’s also courageous, intelligent, and funny. Somehow, revealing his secret identity to her seems to have resolved the disquiet in her. She no longer stammers in his presence (though her cheeks go red when he compliments her, same as always). She’s significantly less clumsy around him, too. He’s honored, really, to watch her shine. (He tries not to dwell on the fact that it took revealing himself as Chat Noir to make himself more approachable to her; that’s understandable, isn’t it? Chat Noir is a hero, after all.)

Then, one evening, he comes home to take his dinner and finds his father waiting at the table--a sight Adrien hasn’t seen since the news broke about his disability and everything crumbled apart for the Agreste name. 

“Sit down,” Gabriel says.

Adrien sits.

Gabriel’s face is impassive. Adrien forces himself to sit up as straight as he can in response. “Sir?”

Another tablet pushed his way, a terrible echo of what had passed between them before. Adrien picks it up and forces himself to read the words on the screen. He blinks and reads them again. “I don’t understand. Sir.”

Gabriel’s jaw tightens and releases. “It’s a contract, obviously. One of four I’ve received over the past few weeks. Are you familiar with this...Hope Rises...corporation?”

Adrien hesitates, not sure if he should admit to it. “Yes. They’re a relatively new clothing vendor--originally funded by a community kickstater. Their brand went viral last year.” He pauses and adds, carefully, “They specialize in customizable pieces for disabled clients.”

Gabriel hums softly. “At least you’ve been paying attention.”

In truth, Adrien wouldn’t know about Hope Rises at all if not for his work as Chat Noir. Their founder had chased him down while on patrol one night and asked if he’d be interested in promoting the brand. He had agreed. They’d published the promotion via one of Alya’s brief online interviews. It was one of his more popular solo stints on Alya’s Ladyblog.

Adrien reads the contract over again, the puzzle pieces starting to fall into place. “They want me to model for them,” he says, slowly. “They want to incorporate my crutches and braces into the photoshoot. They want me to give a small interview to be included as a blurb.”

“Your reading comprehension remains intact, I see,” Gabriel drawls.

Adrien glances at his father. Gabriel is many things, but he’s rarely sarcastic. He must be especially piqued by all of this. “You said there are other offers?”

“Yes. From similar outlets.”

“Brands for disabled clients,” Adrien clarifies.

Gabriel’s impassivity goes hard about the eyes. “Yes,” he says, brittle.

Adrien smothers a smile. His Father _is_ angry. Angry to have been proven wrong. Angry that Adrien is wanted as-is, for once, despite his Father’s prejudices. 

“I want to say yes to all of them,” Adrien declares. “I’ll provide unique shoots and interviews for each one, if they don’t mind the overlap.”

Gabriel nods, a single, sharp jerk of his chin down and up. “Fine. You will handle the negotiation process yourself.”

“Sir?” Adrien asks, surprised. He’s never been given the leeway to organize his own contracts, before.

“I’ll have no part in this farce,” Gabriel says, and he leaves before Adrien can so much as think of a retort.

The dismissal stings. But the three contracts laid out before Adrien more than make up for the pain.

\--

Marinette all but screams in delight when he invites her to his first shoot for Hope Rises. 

“I can’t believe this is happening,” she gushes, dancing around the carts of costumes for the various models. “The designs are so inspired! Look at the buttons on the shoulders of this coat!”

Rene Abara, the designer, approaches. She’s a large woman with dark black skin and perfectly applied, if eclectic, makeup. Her top is a bright and eye-catching neon green with puffed sleeves and tiny pearl buttons all down the front. Her white pants are embroidered with flowers and cuffed high on her ankles to prevent the fabric from tangling up in the wheels of her walker. The delicately threaded flowers match her eyeshadow.

Adrien has heard many things about Ms. Abara’s work from other designers and photographers he’s worked with previously in his now dead career as a mainstream model. None of those comments were especially kind. Rene’s speciality lies in designing clothing for bodies underrepresented in fashion. She started her career creating formal outfits exclusively for plus sizes, focusing especially on sizes 50 [a U.S. 18] and up--sizes not easily found in most brick and mortar stores, especially in France. Her work back then had been beautiful and intricate, acknowledging and celebrating the bodies she fit for instead of trying to hide them away. 

A little over ten years after her debut, Rene had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Her sudden personal introduction to the experience of physical disability caused an immediate and drastic shift in her mission as a clothing designer. While she maintains her work for large bodies of all genders, her work with Hope Rises focuses on clothing that is accessible for individuals working with assistive devices and limitations in terms of range of motion and strength. 

“The buttons are an illusion. They hide the velcro underneath,” Ms. Abara explains. She eyes Marinette up and down thoughtfully. “You’re not one of the models today, are you?”

Adrien lifts his hand from his crutch and offer a small wave. Neither he nor Ms. Abara can spare their hands for shaking. It’s nice, for once, to not have to feel awkward about it. “Good morning, madame. I’m Adrien Agreste. I’m modeling today. This is Marinette Dupain-Cheng. She’s my friend. And my ‘gopher,’” Adrien adds, shooting a grin Marinette’s way. She rolls her eyes in response, which only makes him grin wider.

“Mhm,” Ms. Abara hums. “And your girlfriend, too, I’m guessing.”

Both Adrien and Marinette go red about the cheeks in response. Ms. Abara laughs. It’s a low, throaty, pleasant sound. “I thought so. Well, it is good to have you here, Mr. Agreste. I’ve seen your work.”

Adrien ducks his head slightly, not sure if that’s a compliment or not.

“You’ll find this experience different from what you’re used to, I’m sure,” Ms. Abara continues, dryly. For the first time Adrien wonders if she knows what is said about her designs in mainstream fashion circles. He hopes she doesn’t suspect him of the same dismissive attitude. He agrees with Marinette--Ms. Abara’s work is as stunning as it is ingenious.

“I think Adrien would welcome something different,” Marinette pipes up. She has a rarely used line of steel running through her words. “He’s here today because of that difference, in fact.”

Ms. Abara tilts her head at Marinette thoughtfully. She then directs her attention to Adrien. “On a few blacklists, now, are you?”

Adrien grimaces. Apparently that is answer enough. Ms. Abara nods. “Yes. Me, too. Come along, then. If you’re to be modeling my work, you should be taught how to wear it.”

Adrien moves obligingly out of the way of Ms. Abara’s walker (neon green, like her top) and follows behind her in slow, careful swings. There’s more open space in this lot than he’s used to--the better to serve the many assistive devices being used--but it’s still a tight fit. He doesn’t want to upset a rack of clothes on his first day.

Marinette walks behind him, pausing from time to time to remark on a particular print or cut of something hanging on either side of them. Ms. Abara responds to such statements with ease, answering questions in a neat, concise manner that seems to indicate she’s worked with excitable design students before.

“The new adaptive line features quite a lot of elastic, velcro, and hidden closures,” Ms. Abara explains as she pulls down an outfit freshly removed from its garment bag. “This provides more opportunities for physically disabled clients to dress themselves comfortably, but it also requires a good deal more attention to detail than one finds in typical clothing stock. The zippers and buttons must be applied precisely to prevent chafing or bruising to the individual. Most of this line must be priced accordingly, to account for double-inspections and a lot of hand-stitching.”

Ms. Abara gestures toward another rack of clothing. “We also have a line of sensory friendly clothing. With those items, we aspire for the exact opposite--no buttons or zippers, no velcro or elastic; the vast majority of standard closure options play hell with our highly sensitive clients. The amount of testing and focus groups that went into the development alone was...exhausting. Worth it, though, of course.” 

Marinette wanders over the sensory-friendly rack and picks up a top. She frowns at it, examining the work closely. “Oh, I see! It’s a wrap around. I can see the ties, here. Oh, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the outside. How clever.”

“The idea is that a wheelchair user with tactile sensitivity should be able to apply and remove the garment by themselves without having to lean too far out of their ‘chair,” Ms. Abara explains, nodding her approval of Marinette’s assessment. 

Ms. Abara turns her attention back to Adrien. “I believe they have you slotted to model the original adaptable line. Will the closures bother you? If so, I can talk to the director of the shoot and have you reassigned.”

Adrien smiles. The question is so thoughtful. He’s not used to that level of care on a ‘shoot by any means. “I’m fine with it,” he assures her. 

“Good.”

Marinette and Adrien exchange glances. Marinette ties and unties the wrap-around shirt, obviously charmed. Adrien relaxes his his shoulders, having not been aware until that moment how nervous he was about being in a photoshoot again.

Ms. Abara pulls a red shirt with magnetic buttons down from the rack as well as a pair of pants with thin, almost invisible zippers down both legs. “I’ll find wardrobe. We might have to refit some of these before the shooting starts.” She turns her shrewd gaze to Marinette. “My assistant is over there by the coffee kiosk. If you wanted to know more about my work, he’s your man, hm?”

Marinette beams. “Thank you!”

Before Adrien goes too far, Marinette circles him carefully and squeezes his forearm. “You’ll be wonderful, _chaton_,” she assures him in a soft whisper.

All the way back to wardrobe, Adrien feels like he’s floating on air.

\--

“That was the best ‘shoot I’ve ever had,” Adrien tells Marinette as they settle into the car. 

The Gorilla’s eyes meet Adrien’s in the rearview, quietly intrigued. Adrien grins at him reflexively, still high off the adrenaline of a job well done in a work environment unlike any other he’s ever experienced before.

“Everyone was very friendly,” Marinette agrees.

“Not just that. They....” Adrien trails off.

“What?” Marinette presses, gentle and curious and unlikely to laugh at him.

Adrien turns away, keeping his gaze fixed out the window as the car pulls out of the lot and onto the streets of the city. “I’ve never felt like I belonged like that before. The photographer was patient and thoughtful--he never tried to make me move in a way that was painful or strange for me. The wardrobe staff let me sit down or lean while they worked. Even makeup asked me beforehand if it was all right for them to put my crutches against a far wall or if I wanted them closer. And none of the photos hide me away.”

Marinette’s hand is light and undemanding as it encircles his own. “I’m happy for you,” she says, softly. “I’m so glad it was a good day for you, too.”

He turns back to her, smiling. “You’re just bursting to tell me about what Ms. Abara’s assistant told you, aren’t you?”

She blushes. “Am I so obvious?”

“Go on,” Adrien encourages her. “Tell me. I want to hear it all.”

She bounces just slightly in her seat and takes a deep breath before diving in, not sparing a single detail, he’s sure.

He loves her.

(He loves Ladybug.)

He loves Marinette.

\--

The catalogue isn’t as polished as Adrien’s other work, he knows. Hope Rises doesn’t have the same budget as the many reputable, high-class, high-fashion brands he’s worked with in the past, including that of Agreste. The lighting is subpar, the editing work basic, the clothing itself well-constructed and practical but not exactly fit for Milan. It’s a directory for purchase, not a glossy work of art.

It’s also the best thing Adrien has ever been a part of. He buys fifteen copies of the Hope Rises catalogue and brings them to school, shyly offering one to each of his friends.

Chloe grimaces in distaste when she catches sight of the thin, matte pages of the publication, but she takes it all the same. She flips through the contents dismissively only to stop abruptly on a page toward the middle--Adrien is the third model in the middle row, wearing a red button down and zip-up black pants with the pricing marked tidily underneath his feet. His crutches and braces are on full display in every shot, but in this one especially they take forefront, almost more-so than the clothes. He leans on them unselfconsciously, bending a bit at the shoulders as he always does when properly balanced. “You...you look like you,” she remarks, a bit breathlessly. “Oh.”

She swallows thickly and thawks him on the shoulder with the rolled up clothing catalogue. “Next time, invite_ me_ to the ‘shoot instead of Dupain-Chang. I would have told you to put your chin up more. You look like a walrus.”

Adrien knows he doesn’t look like a walrus. And, even if he did, he’d at least look like a stylish and comfortable one. He removes his arm from a crutch long enough to give Chloe a side-hug. “You’ll always be my first friend, you know,” he tells her. “And I’ll invite you to the next shoot if you can promise to behave.”

Chloe sniffs. “I’ll try.”

\--

Ladybug stands out starkly against the cloudless blue of the Parisian sky. For a moment Chat Noir simply hangs back and watches her, watches the way the breeze flutters through her hair ribbons. She is the very picture of a proper superheroine--strong, abled, calm. 

Chat Noir shifts his feet and catapults himself into the sky, landing gracefully next to his partner. “_Bonjour, _my lady.”

She turns to him and smiles. “You’re late.”

“A cat is never late,” he chides her. “He arrives exactly when he means to.”

“You stole _that_ from Tolkien,” she sighs at him, though her amusement is clear in the sparkle of her eyes. Her blue eyes, framed so nicely by that black-spotted red mask.

Strange, really, how long it took him to recognize such beloved eyes, now matter how pretty and distracting the accessory.

“Not everything can be original,” he says. He jumps onto the lifted edge of the roof and walks it carefully, arms extended like a tightrope walker. “After all, you and I are borrowed, aren’t we?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hundreds of Ladybugs. Hundreds of Chats. We’re just carrying on a tradition, like repeating an old quote.”

She squints at him. “Chat--.”

“I know who you are,” he says. That stills her, silences her. He’s almost sorry to be the cause of it.

“You couldn’t--.”

Chat swings on his staff and leaps off the lifted edge, landing right in front of his lady. He rises slowly, leaning on his staffs for moral--if not physical--support. “Marinette,” he says, voice barely a whisper. “Marinette. Please. Don’t hide. I don’t have to hide, anymore, and neither should you.”

Ladybug’s eyes fill abruptly with tears. “Adrien,” she chokes out, overwhelmed. “H-how did you find out?”

“The better I got to know Marinette, the more of Ladybug I saw in her. It wasn’t that hard.”

“But our secret! No one must know!”

“We can know,” he argues. “We should know. How else are we to protect each other, in both our lives?”

“You don’t understand. It complicates everything so much.”

Chat Noir smiles and rubs her tears away with the thumbs of his gloved hands. “I think we can figure it out.”

She stares at him for a moment, lost in a silent thought. Then, she smiles wetly at him. “Yeah,” she agrees, softly. “Yeah, we can figure it out.”

\--

Marinette squeezes his fingers. “It’s nice to see you on a billboard, again.”

Adrien clears his throat a few times before speaking. He’s been teetering on the edge of an emotional break down most of the day. He never expected any of this. He never expected to see his career rebooted, springboarded into a world where he could be appreciated for who he really is. He never expected to have his Ladybug by his side day and night, to know who she is and be known in return. 

Adrien Agreste used to have dreams. He dreamed of dancing and jumping and racing up and down the stairs. Such petty, superficial dreams those seem, now, in the face of his wonderful and awe-inspiring reality.

“It’s all official, now. The paperwork came through just this morning, right before the billboard went up. The Adrien Agreste brand is fully established, a distinct brand from my father’s. Tomorrow, first thing, Rene Abara and I are meeting to sign the contract--by this time next week, Hope Rises will have full financial support through my company.” Adrien glances at her sidelong. “I’m sure the design team for the new magazine would appreciate having fresh blood on the team if you’re interested in an internship. Paid, of course.”

Marinette grins at him. “Just don’t pay me too much. If you really want to be financially independent from your father, you’ll have to run a tight ship.”

“Only for the first couple of years,” Adrien says, shrugging. “I’ve got plans to go international, someday. We can succeed with the right connections, I’m sure of it. I made a few friends in high places. They’ll remember me, now that I’ve got a leg to stand on.” He coughs. “In a manner of speaking.”

Marinette wrinkles her nose, as she always does when he makes jokes about his disability. “Is everything sorted out with Nino?”

“Yeah,” Adrien says, grinning. “I’m going to help him clear out the storage room this weekend. I should be able to move in not long after--I’m not moving that much of my stuff.”

Marinette squeezes his hand again. “I’m happy for you.”

“I’m glad someone is. Chloe’s having a fit about me moving out of the mansion. I keep trying to explain to her about the stairs, but she won’t hear it.”

“She’d be more understanding if you talked to her about your father.”

Adrien shakes his head. “No. It’s good enough to distance myself from him. I don’t want to cause him any trouble. He’ll do that enough on his own, I think, given time.”

Marinette sighs. “I’m sorry. I can’t even imagine how hard it is for you. I know he’s not exactly warm, but--.”

Adrien lifts a shoulder slightly. His crutch lands with a soft thud as his shoulder lowers. “Sometimes, the people we want to love most in the world are the ones that cause us the most pain. I’m just lucky I have the resources to get away from him for a while, even if it is only across the city.”

“You’re doing amazing things, despite him. Someday, he’ll see that, and he’ll be proud.”

“Even if he never does, it doesn’t matter. I deserve better. I didn’t know I did until recently. But I see it, now.”

Marinette’s phone alarm goes off. She silences it. “Time for patrol.”

“Go on ahead. I’ll meet you in the usual place.”

“Don’t be late,” Marinette scolds, kissing his cheek. She disappears into an alley. A moment latre, Ladybug goes flying into the air, thrown high by the arc of her yoyo.

Adrien watches her go with a goofy smile on his face.

Plagg rustles in Adrien’s bag. “Are we going or not?”

Adrien stares up at the billboard for a few minutes more. His crutches create stark silver lines against the dark background. His braces draw the eye to the magnetic button closures on the front of his jeans. The jacket he wears is secured with hidden velcro with beautiful silver clasps laid over the top. “It’s a good name, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

Adrien gestures to the billboard with his chin. “Hope Rises.”

“It’s not the worst name ever,” Plagg says, with faint praise. “Listen, are we just gonna stand here all night or--?”

“Plagg! Claws out!”

Chat Noir soars high, landing on a nearby rooftop and breaking into a loping run. The wind whips by him. He can hear the laughter of Paris’s citizens ringing in his ears. For the moment, at least, all is well.

And maybe it will stay that way for a while. Maybe forever. He can only hope.


End file.
